


falling awake

by Thealmostrhetoricalquestion



Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Human, Angst, Fae & Fairies, Fantasy, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Memory Loss, Monsters, Mystery, Offscreen Temporary Character Death, Road Trips, Romantic Fluff, Slow Build, this all sounds very confusing in the tags lmao
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-30
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2018-12-21 20:19:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 63,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11951880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thealmostrhetoricalquestion/pseuds/Thealmostrhetoricalquestion
Summary: Hands dug under his arms, pulling him up and out of his home. Dirt cascaded off of him as the three boys hauled him out of the shallow grave and dropped him onto the floor, where he lay on his side, weak and confused. Blades of stiff grass tickled his nose. It was so much colder up here, crisp and clean, and when he breathed, he could smell something sharp and dewy. The night air whipped his hair into a frenzy; it had grown long over time and hung around his forehead, black with mud.“He looks like something out of a horror movie,” said the drawling voice, the one that belonged to someone called Jace. “How long has he been in there?”“Oh, I don’t know, Jace,” the reedy voice – Simon? – said mockingly. “How long do you think someone can survive being buried alive before they’re not alive anymore?”But I wasn’t alive, he wanted to say.





	1. The Boy in the Grave

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This first chapter is in Magnus' POV, but it will switch so I can show all different sides of the narrative. There's a pretty detailed description of someone being dug up out of the ground in this chapter, but nothing gross or graphic. I posted something similar before as an original work but I deleted that. I hope you enjoy it! Thank you.

Soft hands had helped him into his grave. Soft, violet-scented palms and rounded fingernails, white skin and wrinkled knuckles. A small scar at the base of the thumb. The scent of smoke and ash had been erased over the years, replaced with the aroma of good, clean soil, but the smell of violets had lingered for a long time, longer than he could remember. Those hands were his last real memory, and he clung to it, even in the depths of sleep. 

He pretended he was asleep, because it was easier than the truth. Sometimes little bits of life flickered through his mind, enough life for him to wonder if he really had died. And then the darkness would swarm back in, leaving him with an empty mind and a doubtless heart; he was dead. 

It was obvious, after all. The dead didn’t do anything. They were not musical creatures. Their hands were too limp to hold cards or pens or brushes with. There was nothing to occupy the time with besides the memories of what they had done and who they had been, before they were dead. 

And he didn’t have those memories, so time crawled by. He didn’t have anything, not even a name. If he had ever had one, he couldn’t remember it, lost to the earth and the dirt. 

He was dead, and yet, in his most lucid states, which came when the wind above him wailed so loudly that even ghosts shivered and hid, and when the noise of passing footsteps reached his clogged ears, he pretended that he was still alive. He pretended that he was stuck, somewhere in the hazy space between sleeping and waking, that he was a living dream, poised on the precipice of never waking up.

Of course, it didn’t really matter whether he was alive or not; the fact remained that soft hands had helped him into his grave, into the long space that cocooned his body, and there he lay, resting. 

But it wasn’t his final resting place. 

On a cold night, as the wind howled hungrily, something struck him hard in the shoulder. Perhaps if he had been properly alive he would have made a sound, but his lungs were still and empty. He kept silent, eyelids fluttering as crumbs of dirt trickled down to land on translucent skin. The pressure in his shoulder was just that – not pain, but a hard and unrelenting pressure. Any more pressure and the skin would surely break, he thought. 

Noise reached him. He listened through thick layers of earth as voices crackled and hissed above him. He felt as though he were deep underwater, listening to muffled people chattering above him. The hard thing in his shoulder shifted once, and then disappeared. 

If he could have breathed, he would have shouted. It had been so long since anything had invaded his space: Even the bugs kept away, inexplicably repelled by something in the earth that surrounded him. The possible presence of another person was simultaneously too much to hope for and exactly what he wanted. He longed for the pressure to return. 

There were a few seconds of agonising silence, and then the pressure was back, nudging at his forearm this time. It seemed to disappear every few seconds, only to return again and again with more weight behind it each time. The voices were back, still crackling angrily, and this time there was a weight behind the voices too, the kind that spoke of strong emotion. 

Something cold caressed the bare skin of his neck and he twitched violently. He was so used to the warm earth that encased his body that the temperature change was startling. The cold continued to grow, although the pressure remained in the same steady rhythm. 

He began to feel something in his chest, something that unfurled unfamiliarly. He was used to being bland and dull, warm and tired, barely on the brink of existence. He didn’t feel things, not down here, because he was as dead as a doll, and that’s what made it bearable. It made it easier to exist like this, in a state of constant sleep, but now he felt the rough edge of impatience curling within him. He wanted to be found, and he wanted to be found now.

As if it could sense his agitation, the pressure sped up suddenly. There was the scrape of something metallic and then the voices came again, a little more distinct now. 

He still couldn’t move – it had been so long, he thought he might have forgotten how. Cold air brushed down his body and he opened one sleepy eyelid, just a sliver of an inch, but even that was a phenomenal effort. It was like peeling away wallpaper. 

Everything was dark. Earth coated his face and every inch of him, but he couldn’t feel the weight of it. He was not dead, he realised. He was not dead, and yet he definitely should have been. 

Cracks of light appeared, blinding even in their small capacity. They fanned across the ceiling of soil, thin traceries, widening with each nudge of the solid object. 

Realisation hit him quickly, sharp and breath-taking, like a bolt of electricity. Somebody was digging him out. The realisation was accompanied by a hot flare of pain just below his left knee as the sharp thing – the shovel – drove into the bone in his leg. He gasped and then coughed as dirt fell into his mouth. His first breath in a long time filled his lungs with musty, stale air and clumps of dirt. Spluttering, his hands creaked into use as he pushed ineffectively at the ceiling of earth above him. The cracks of light became pockets, which in turn became craters, and the ceiling collapsed. 

The soil collided with him. Panic began to creep through his body as he surged upwards with a surprising torrent of energy. His hands broke through first, fingers trembling in the bitingly cold air. Then he was bolting up and up, bursting through the earth in a shower of grass and soil and mud. 

Somebody shrieked. There was a heavy clang as something fell to the floor, and several thumps and yells as someone followed it down, tripping over their own feet. If there were other noises, he couldn’t hear them over his own heartbeat, which had spluttered to life and begun to thump hard, as if to make up for all the time it had lost lying still. It was heavy in his chest, sitting there like a small bird caged behind his ribs, fluttering its wings desperately. 

He coughed uncontrollably, spitting dirt. His knee throbbed with pain. Every joint in his body seemed to have seized up, every muscle aching. Still coughing, he brought shaking fingers to his face, skating them over the thin bones and the stretched skin. His hands shook as he put them to his pulse, feeling the evidence of life pumping beneath his soft fingertips. 

“What the fuck?” someone was saying, over and over again. The voice sounded male, thin and reedy with fear. Gasping, he looked around blindly for the source of the voice. He was still in the pit that he had been buried in, panicked and in pain. He tried to wiggle his toes, but he couldn’t see if they were moving through all of the dirt. 

Someone else was swearing, a long stream of increasingly creative curse words. 

“Hey,” came a deep voice. This was someone else again. He blinked, not sure why he still couldn’t see. Then something soft rubbed at his eyes, and he flinched back, only to be hushed. The touch was hesitant, prepared to retreat at the slightest hint of danger, so he kept himself as still as possible, eyes closed as the hands pushed dirt off of his eyelids. His lashes were clumped together, sticky with damp soil, and then the hands wiped it away, and then the touch was gone. He blinked rapidly. 

He could see. 

He almost wished that he couldn’t. Everything was dark, but it was different to the pitch-black darkness he had become accustomed too, the darkness that came with being underground, with being dead. Instead, it was an inky black darkness that seemed to fade the more he blinked. As the black faded to blue, his eyes began to sting and water. He shielded them with his hands, hunching his shoulders as though he could retreat from the pain. 

“What the fuck?” 

“Hey, it’s alright.”

He didn’t reply. He couldn’t reply. Now that he was awake, he felt more tired than ever. He ached all the way down to the soft centres of his bones. Everything felt heavy. He moved, stiltedly, and his stomach began to pulse angrily with pain. 

“How the hell is it alright? He just popped out of the ground.” This was the slow, drawling voice, and he realised that there were at least three people surrounding him. 

“Shut up, Jace, I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to him, and I don’t know, okay? It’s not like I was expecting it.” 

“What the fuck?”

“Simon. That’s not helping. Both of you, stop squawking and help me get him out of there.”

Hands dug under his arms, pulling him up and out of his home. Dirt cascaded off of him as the three boys hauled him out of the shallow grave and dropped him into the floor, where he lay on his side, weak and confused. Blades of stiff grass tickled his nose. It was so much colder up here, crisp and clean, and when he breathed, he could smell something sharp and dewy. The night air whipped his hair into a frenzy. It had grown long over time and hung around his shoulders, black with mud. 

“He looks like something out of a horror movie,” said the drawling voice, the one that belonged to someone called Jace. “How long has he been in there?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Jace,” the reedy voice – Simon? – said mockingly. “How long do you think someone can survive being buried alive before they’re not alive anymore?”

_But I wasn’t alive_ , he wanted to say. 

“There’s no way we just stumbled across him seconds after someone finished burying him. Look around, there’s no one else out here. There was grass growing on top of him, for Christ’s sake.”

He wanted to cry. He closed his eyes blissfully, allowing the voices to fill his mind. Everything was loud enough that it hurt, the sound amplified by years of silence. 

“Both of you, be quiet,” said the one who had cleaned his eyes. This voice was nothing like the touch, not hesitant or nervous. It was very strong. He wanted to see who it belonged to, so he slid his face sideways, scraping his cheek along the ground. He let his eyes open once, in time to see a blurred face, and then the pain forced them shut again. 

“We need to get him help,” said the strong voice. “Do we call someone?”

‘That’s a great idea, truly,’ said Simon, with a fake sort of brightness. “We’ll call the police and tell them we stumbled across a body whilst attempting to bury a different body. What a fantastic plan.”

Abruptly, the atmosphere changed. Tension thrummed in the air, crackling like electricity. Another body? He coughed again, in an attempt to break the silence, and to clear his throat. Jace swore softly. 

What did they mean, another body?

“Okay,” said the strong voice. He could hear the panic in it. “Okay. Nobody do anything rash. Look, kid, we’re not going to hurt you. Can you get up?” 

It took a moment before he realised that the boy was talking to him. He wanted to balk at the word kid, because he felt anything but young. He felt older than the earth itself, the weight of the years pressing down on him, crushing him. He couldn’t remember what he looked like, but surely he didn’t look young enough to be mistaken for a child?

He grunted, the sound ripping through him, but he wasn’t entirely sure that he could stand. Everything was loud and beginning to be frightening. He hurt all over and his mind was still a haze of confusion. With a rush of fear, it struck him that he didn’t know these people. He didn’t know if he could trust them not to hurt him. He didn’t know that they wouldn’t just shove him back into his grave. 

Hesitantly, he pushed himself up onto his elbows. His arms trembled and shook, weak from disuse. 

“Can you hear me?”

He opened his mouth to say, _yes, yes I can hear you,_ but all that came out was more dirt. Jace made a disgusted sound from behind him. It was too much, too much to deal with. He fell back down against the ground and let his eyes close properly this time, slipping into unconsciousness.


	2. The Boy on the Bed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! New chapter, no warnings here :) Thank you for the lovely response and all the wonderful comments on the first chapter, hopefully you enjoy this one too :) Thank you!

The silence was stifling. 

Jace was lounging backwards on a chair, tipping it back so that it was balanced precariously on two thin legs. It was one of those hard-backed plastic monstrosities that usually plagued libraries and classrooms, and not dingy hotel rooms, but Jace slouched in it like it was a comfortable chaise lounge. On any other day, this might not have bothered Simon as much as it did, but it had been a strange night, and something about Jace’s casually unaffected behaviour made him grit his teeth as he paced back and forth. 

He might have been able to deal with his own annoyance without snapping if he had someone else to distract him, but Alec was downstairs, pleading with the narrow-eyed receptionist for a key, not knowing that the doors were so cheaply built that it had only taken a few seconds of Jace fiddling about with a curved hair clip to break it open.

“Can you act like you’re at least taken aback by all of this?” Simon eventually snarled. He didn’t like the sharp tone of his voice, but he couldn’t help but get irritable when he was panicked. Not that it mattered, because Jace just shrugged in reply. Nothing that Simon said ever seemed to register in Jace’s head. Simon knew, on a deeper level, that Jace was clever, but mostly he suspected that Jace’s brain was so full of fluff that there was no room for anything substantial. 

There were three of them, altogether, although Jace was gone so often that their little group could easily be mistaken for two by an outsider. Jace was a person who enjoyed a little night-time wandering, or at least enjoyed the illusion of mystery it supposedly shrouded him in. It was one of the first things that Jace told girls that he met, that he was a lover of the night, along with another thousand awful pick-up lines. Simon would be the first to tell those girls that Jace only went out when he was sure the air wasn't humid enough to ruin his hair. 

“Why do you look so miserable?” Jace asked. One finely-plucked eyebrow was quirked in the direction of the second hotel bed, furthest from the door. It was always a mystery to Simon, how Jace managed to make even the smallest action look superior. 

Simon paused in his pacing, glanced at the boy on the bed nervously, and then looked away quickly. 

“We did just dig him out of the ground,” Simon said, keeping his voice low, trying to be tactful.

The boy didn't say anything. He hadn’t said anything since they’d pulled him up out of the earth and watched him faint at their feet. Simon shoved his hands in his pockets, conscious of the boy’s keen stare and determined to ignore it, and proceeded to pace back and forth, wearing a path in the dirty carpet. For a hotel, the place was pretty clean, but there were suspicious stains on the floor that led him to believe that nobody had vacuumed in a long, long time. 

On the other bed, Simon’s laptop beeped rather sadly at him. His laptop had survived three years of Simon’s haphazard care, without any touching up and just the most basic of updates. Simon was not a stupid person. In fact, he considered himself above average when it came to intelligence, and yet he remained clueless when it came to technology. With a dismal look at the cracked screen and the disc tray that kept popping open without prompting, Simon had to admit that his laptop might have finally reached its end. 

“Traitor,” he murmured, as his pacing brought him within reach of the laptop. 

“Yeah, but he’s out now,” Jace was saying, when Simon pulled his gaze away from the blank screen in front of him. “Surely he should look a bit happier about it.”

A confused, slightly disgusted silence followed Jace's sentence. Simon held up one finger, his other hand pressed to his temple as he tried to will away a headache.

“First of all, that was one of the most ridiculous things to ever worm its way out of your mouth,” he said, before holding up a second finger. “And second of all, have you ever heard of tact?”

The boy looked from Jace to Simon with a confused expression. 

Jace waved one hand lazily through the air, as if to dismiss Simon's words. “I just think he could look a little more cheerful considering we just rescued him. If he were still in the ground, then I’d understand the misery.”

“Do you know, I think you get more stupid with every passing day,” Simon remarked lightly. 

“I didn't know that, in fact, but thank you for the observation,” said Jace, just as lightly. Jace projected an air of being laid-back, uncaring to a point. Simon wasn’t sure if it was just for show or if that was genuinely how Jace felt, and it irritated him that he couldn’t tell. “Besides, I was just making conversation.”

Simon shook his head resignedly and resumed pacing. He still hadn't looked at the boy, not properly. There was something unnervingly unearthly about him, something that prompted Simon to keep his gaze averted, no matter how much his curiosity begged at him to look. 

Simon was about to give up on his pacing when the hotel door swung open with a slight creak. The boy on the bed tensed up, but relaxed slightly when he recognised the figure in the doorway. Alec barely glanced at them as he sidled into the room, one hand passing over his grey face. He looked a lot older than his twenty years. 

“I don't suppose it occurred to you to mention that you were already in here,” said Alec. Simon heard the boy on the bed let out a cautious breath, as though he had been expecting an explosion. Alec didn't seem pissed, just tired. Then again, it had been weeks since Alec had looked anything but tired. 

“We still needed the key,” Simon pointed out. “Jace is the only one who can pick the lock.” 

“It’s all in the tumblers,” Jace chimed in. He mimed twisting a key in mid-air, and then saluted Alec with a rather mocking grin. 

“Plus, I think that woman would have been suspicious if four strangers just marched through the hotel without asking for a room,” Simon continued, pretending not to hear Jace. 

“Especially when one of them looks like something we found in a barn,” Jace added, nodding at the boy. “A damp, broken, hundred-year-old barn that had fell on top of him before we could get him out.”

Alec sighed and collapsed on the bed adjacent to the boy’s, knocking his knee against Simon’s laptop. His bag slid from his shoulder to the floor and a little patch of dust rose up around it like a half-hearted halo, illuminated by the fading light visible through the grimy window. There was only one window, and only two beds, but there was hot water and plenty of sheets. Simon thought he even spied a vending machine around the corner on the way up here. As hotel rooms went, this one was not the worst he had ever stayed in. 

“On that note,’ Jace announced, standing up and cracking his knuckles, “I'm going to check out the bar we passed down the street. Any takers?”

“It’s almost one in the morning,” Simon said, raising an eyebrow. 

Jace bared his teeth at him. “Beer for breakfast. My favourite.” 

“You’re not going anywhere,” Alec mumbled. He was already half-asleep, one arm slung over his head and the other in his pocket, and Simon didn’t need to look to know that Alec was clutching a letter. It was a piece of tacky notepaper with four lines on it, stained with a blot of blood and many tears. Simon knew the words off by heart now. They all did. 

Alec rubbed sleepily at his eyes and then forced himself to sit up, groaning as something cracked in his spine. Simon stopped in front of the door and leaned against it, arms folded across his chest. It would do nothing to stop Jace – the other boy could easily lift Simon up and hurl him through the nearest window if he fancied, but nevertheless, Jace collapsed back onto the chair with a huff, tipping his head back to stare at the ceiling. He looked displeased, mouth twisted in a frown, but there was also something deeper in his expression, something that spoke of sorrow that prompted Simon to look away. 

“We have to decide what to do,” Alec said reluctantly. He had both elbows on his knees, head cradled in his hands. “The… body… has been dealt with, but the guy needs some help.” 

“Understatement of the century,” Jace commented, snorting softly. “Seriously, that’s right up there with Simon not having any fashion sense and me being kind of good-looking.’ 

“Could you be any more self-absorbed?” Simon snapped. He wasn’t actually angry, but he didn’t want to think about the first part of Alec’s statement. Burying a body had never been on his bucket list. He had to keep reminding himself that there hadn’t been another option. 

The worst part was that the burial had been easy. Once the boy was out of the ground, there was enough room for the other body. A ready-made grave, there for the taking. All that had been left to do was to fill it back up with dirt, smooth it over, and hope that the grass grew back quickly.

“Probably, if I tried really hard,” Jace replied. He leaned back on his chair, arms folded behind his head. Simon wanted to hit him. 

“Enough,” Alec said tiredly. “Quiet down.” 

“What did you call me?” the boy asked hoarsely. 

Simon mouth snapped shut on a retort. All three of them flinched a little. The boy’s voice was croaky and rough, and he coughed several times after forcing out his question. He sounded as if he spent his spare time gargling glass. 

Alec jerked his head up to stare. Jace slowly looked away from the ceiling, eyes fixed curiously on the boy, who fidgeted uncomfortably at the sudden attention. Only then, once everyone else was staring, did Simon let himself look. 

The boy’s skin was streaked and dirty, but beneath the thick layer of dirt, his skin was bronze, darker than any of theirs. His threadbare clothes hung off his frame raggedly, ripped and dirty. A folded bathrobe sat next to him on the bed, placed there by Jace, but the boy had not touched it. He kept glancing at it uncertainly, as if he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with it. 

“You can talk?” Alec asked. It was something of a miracle, the way that Alec could make his voice impossibly soft and soothing. He stood tall, with a lean, muscled body, and he wore all black. His face was usually fixed in a severe frown, especially lately. Intimidation should have been his middle name, but something about his mannerisms betrayed his appearance, enough so that kids smiled at him in the street and classmates easily asked him for notes, and elderly people pinched his cheek when he helped them reach higher shelves in a shop. 

The boy stroked his throat. “Hurts.” 

Alec glanced at Simon, who shrugged. “I imagine it’s from struggling to breathe. You must have been… down there, for a little while.” 

It was a truth that Simon was attempting to avoid. Their body had been heavy, hard to drag across the field they were in, and they had taken their sweet time, all three of them, ducking low in a desperate attempt not to be seen. The fact was, they had been in that field for quite a while before Simon had started to dig, which meant that the boy had been under the ground for all that time, maybe even longer. 

It shouldn’t have even been possible. The boy should have at least been unconscious by the time Simon had dug him up. He shouldn’t have rocketed up out of the earth like he had been waiting for it for all of eternity. And then there was the matter of how they had managed to dig in exactly the right place. 

_Luck_ , Simon told himself, and then, slightly more doubtfully, _but you don’t believe in luck. Not anymore._

“Guy,” the boy said, clearing his throat with a wince. “You called me guy. Is that my name?” 

Something heavy plummeted to the bottom of Simon’s stomach, like a brick sinking to the bottom of a lake. He blinked at the boy, and then he looked at Alec, who was frowning in concern. Jace shot Simon a look, like, what the hell have we gotten ourselves into?

“You don’t know your name?” Alec asked hesitantly. “What do you know?” 

The boy looked at him blankly. Simon thought he could see the beginnings of panic in those dark eyes. The boy glanced at each of them in turn, but his gaze kept catching on things around the room. They were ordinary things; a jacket slung over the back of a chair, pockets turned out in the search for money; a pair of ratty trainers by the door, laces undone and trailing on the floor; a small bedside cabinet, that kind that was whisper-thin and came with a complementary Bible; and the lampshade, blue and laden with dust. Ordinary things, but the guy looked at them like they were treasures in a trove. 

Eventually, his gaze flicked back to Alec, and his mouth turned down. 

“I don’t think I know anything,” he said. 

Simon watched calculatingly as the boy folded in on himself, hunching his shoulders and hunkering down. It was like watching a flower close up in the absence of sunshine. Alec obviously noticed it too because he put his hands up, palms facing out like the boy was a frightened animal in the presence of a predator. 

“Whoa,” Alec said, smiling soothingly again. “No personal stuff, that’s fine. I’m Alec, this is Simon and Jace.” He gestured to them both with a flick of his wrist. The boy looked at Simon fleetingly, but Simon felt the look sear through him, and then the gaze was gone again, tripping over Jace. Simon could see his lips move as he mouthed their names to himself. 

“Why can’t I remember anything?” 

“Honestly, I think some shit must have happened to you,” Jace said bluntly. He was either painfully honest or irritatingly cryptic and sarcastic. There was no in-between with Jace. 

“It’s not surprising that you don’t remember some things,” Simon said, pulling out his mobile phone. “People who have gone through a trauma, particularly to the head, can experience some memory loss. Temporary amnesia. I think what you’ve been through definitely qualifies as trauma, even if you didn’t hit your head. Your memories should come back to you soon.” 

He could feel Jace rolling his eyes in his direction, scoffing at his know-it-all tone. The boy gazed at him curiously, his eyes very bright and wild in his dirt-streaked face. Simon couldn’t quite tell if they were brown or black, but after a second of looking at them, he shuddered and looked away. 

“We dug you up out of the ground,” Alec told him carefully. “It was around midnight. You passed out, so we put you in the car and took you back here. You remember waking up?” 

The boy nodded slowly, thoughtful. “In the back seat. Walked in. Sat here.” He dragged his hands over the bed beneath him. Simon grimaced as bits of dirt came loose from his hands, sticking to the cream sheets. He definitely needed a shower, as soon as possible. 

“That’s fine, then,” Alec said, nodding. “I’m no expert, but as long as you’re not still forgetting things, I think it’s your long-term memory that’s been affected. You got any other injuries we should know about?”

The boy’s hand went briefly to his knee, then ghosted up to his shoulder. His other arm wrapped around his stomach. 

“Expect you’re hungry, huh?” Jace said, letting his chair fall back on all four feet. The boy looked at him strangely before nodding, dark hair falling over his face. “I always feel hungry when I’ve hurt myself. We’ll get you some food. It’ll be hotel food, but that’s better than nothing.” 

The boy nodded cautiously.

“Are you sure you don’t remember anything?” Alec pressed. 

A consternated expression came over the boy’s face. The little colour that he had gained in the last few minutes drained from his cheeks. Whatever he was remembering, Simon assumed it wasn’t pleasant, if he was remembering anything at all. 

“Look, I’m not going to ask for personal stuff if it’s too difficult or if it hurts you,’ Alec said seriously. “Keep whatever secrets you like. One thing, though.” The boy looked up. “You have to do the same with us. Don’t ask about anything that you might have heard us talking about.”

Jace went remarkably still. Simon felt his face get all pinched without his permission. The boy spent a few moments just looking at them. It was clear that he was curious, maybe even a bit afraid, as one would be if the people that had rescued them began talking about burying another body. 

Simon regretted his words. If he hadn’t spoken, the boy might not have noticed the body they had with them. He might have just collapsed without ever knowing about it. But Simon had been angry, because even in the dark he could see Jace smirking at him for looking so scared. He hadn’t been able to curb the sarcasm, even in the presence of a dead body and an almost-dead body. 

“I won’t ask,” the boy said eventually. Apparently, he had decided that the other body could stay a secret, at least for now. Then he hesitated. “Did you use my grave?”

A chill ran down Simon’s spine. Even Jace looked a little disquieted. It was unnerving to hear him talk about it so casually, as if the fact that he had almost died in a hole in the ground was a daily occurrence, nothing to write home about. 

“It seemed practical,” Simon said, speaking quickly. “No sense in digging another hole.”

He hated how offhand it sounded. He was not a killer or a criminal of any kind. He was the good kid at school, the one who didn’t even bother defacing the desks with anatomically inaccurate drawings of dicks, the one who went to after-school clubs and did his homework on time, the guy in the crappy band, the guy who spent all of his free time playing games online. But the boy didn’t know that. The boy didn’t know anything about them. He just knew what he could see, and what they had told him. 

“That makes sense,” the boy mumbled to himself. Simon thought he saw his jaw clench, as if he were angry.

“There are towels in the bathroom, if you can call it that.” Jace broke the potentially awkward silence, wrinkling his nose in disgust. Jace hated hotels. “You desperately need a soak.”

The boy flushed a ruddy colour beneath the dirt. He seemed to agree though, because he didn’t argue. He slipped off the bed and wobbled for a moment, knees shaking, blinking around the room. Then he padded towards the bathroom, barefoot, allowing the door to snap shut behind him with a soft snick. The sound of the lock clicking into place echoed around the room, and then the shower burst to life behind the door. 

Alec blew out a breath. Simon passed a hand over his face and began to pace again. 

“That could have gone much worse,” Jace offered. “Especially considering we were talking to the victim of an attempted murder about someone we technically murdered.”

“We didn’t murder anyone,” Alec said quietly, face drawn. He collapsed back against the pillows. “Besides, no one’s going to find the grave.” 

“We found the grave,” Jace said pointedly. “It just had a different body in it at the time.” He tipped back on his chair, his face stony and argumentative. 

“Coincidence,” Simon muttered. “Just a coincidence. And they only happen once, or else they wouldn’t be coincidences, so nobody’s going to find this body.” 

“Don’t,” Alec said sharply, as Jace opened his mouth to retort. “Don’t argue. This might be bigger than us or it might not, but the fact is that we found this guy and he’s gone through some serious stuff. I don’t know if we should drop him off at a hospital and have done with it or if we should try and cover our own asses.”

He looked up at Jace, whose gaze softened slightly. He was always softer, stronger, around Alec. 

Simon swallowed, thinking carefully. 

“If we take him to the hospital, they’ll ask questions. Either we answer them or the boy does, and when the hospital reports it, that field will be crawling with police,” Simon said slowly, his mind turning over the problem. “That’s if they even believe us. And if they do believe us, who’s to say they won’t think we did it? We don’t have an alibi. Why would we be up there with a shovel, in the exact space that he was buried alive?”

The words sent a shiver through him. Buried alive. It seemed like something out of a television show, something that happened to fictional people with fictional problems. 

“Doesn’t seem real, does it?” Alec said, echoing Simon’s thoughts. “Buried alive. Imagine being down there under the dirt, losing air, knowing you’ve been put under the ground, knowing you were going to die soon. Do you think he was awake when he went it? It just doesn’t seem real.” 

Simon shuddered, bile rising in his throat. 

“I hate to break it to you,” Jace said grimly, “but nothing about our lives these past few weeks has seemed real. It’s all been one big pile of shit.”

Simon had to agree. It had been like a chapter out of a book, a really dark, disturbing book written by an author that hated his characters, like a portion of someone else’s life. And it hadn’t always been this way. In fact, until very recently, Simon had loved his life. Now, he spent most of his time running for it. 

“So, we’re agreed, then,” Alec said. “We keep it from the police, we keep him away from any kind of authority figure unless something happens to him, or one of us.” 

“We’re kidnapping him?” Simon asked, appalled. 

“It’s either taking him with us, or we leave him here and he brings someone back to that gravesite,” Alec said grimly. “They’ll find the other body and we’ll all be screwed.”

There was a pause, and then Jace said, quietly, “Alec, we can’t do that. He’s already been through enough, do you seriously want to add to that by not letting him leave? You want to add kidnapping to the list of things we’ve done recently?” 

Alec set his jaw, and for a bewildered moment, Simon thought he was going to argue. Then, he dragged a hand through his hair and sighed heavily. 

“No,” Alec said. “No, I didn’t even think of it like that. I’m just panicking, I wouldn’t do that. We’ll ask him what he wants to do, and if he wants to leave, we’ll drive him to the nearest hospital and then make a break for it.” 

“I don’t think he’ll tell anyone,” said Simon. “I think he’s got more things in his life to worry about than us.”

They pondered this in silence. Alec collapsed back against the cushions again, hands over his face. The shower stuttered to a stop in the other room and then flared back to life. Steam was wafting in through the gap in the door. As the silence grew, Jace stood up with a flourish. He snatched up his jacket as he headed for the door. 

“On that note, I’ll be going,” Jace said, shouldering Simon as soon as he got near enough. Simon aimed a punch at his back that missed. He wasn’t the most coordinated of people, even with his new glasses. At least Jace hadn’t seen his failed attempt at retaliation. 

Alec was half-asleep already, but he managed to call out as Jace left the room, “Don’t forget to keep an eye out. We might have been followed, still.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Jace called back. “I’ll be sure to watch out for any murderous bastards that come my way. If you hear some extremely masculine screams, lend a hand.”

Alec snorted and the door slammed shut, leaving Simon with a broken laptop, a mission for food, and the nagging suspicion that their life was about to take another turn for the worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment or a kudos and let me know what you thought :) And come find me @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr if you want to say hey! Thank you!


	3. The Boy in the Bathroom

Hot water scalded his skin. He let it cascade down his back, one hand flat against the cold, uneven tiles to brace himself. His clothes hung around him, soaked to the seams and clinging uncomfortably to his skin. His hair was slicked to the back of his neck. 

He got the sense that long hair was unusual for a boy. Simon and Jace had short hair. Simon’s was dark and it stuck up in short tufts all over his head, unruly. Jace had a long fringe that swept away from his forehead in a dramatic pique, as if it were trying to escape. He didn’t doubt that Jace would never let it escape—Jace looked like the sort of person who kept a comb in his pocket at all times. 

He raked his hands through his hair and felt mud stick to his fingers. There wasn’t much he could do about the length yet, but he could do something about the mud. He couldn’t deny that it would be easier to take care of it if it was shorter. Maybe one of the others would cut it for him. 

He sighed heavily and tipped his head back. Water poured down his face. He doubted very much that the others would want to get any closer to him than was absolutely necessary. The fact that he had exploded out of a grave in a shower of earth and dirt must have been slightly off-putting for them. Add that to the fact that the air was already full of tension and secrets and it made for an awkward party of four. 

Hopefully, being cleaner would help his cause. 

It took a while to scrub away all the dirt and grime. He found it hard to feel filthy – the earth had only ever protected him, but he had seen the looks on the others’ faces. He probably looked and smelled disgusting. He recalled the flare of outrage he had felt when they had mentioned the other body, buried in his grave. Not that he wanted to go back to it, not even slightly. Fear clogged his throat whenever he imagined himself back under the ground, the cramped, closed space. 

And yet, it was the only home he had ever known. 

When his skin was raw and red from scrubbing at it and the dirt was gone, he pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes. The darkness that swallowed him up was suffocating and he immediately tore his hands away, breath stuttering in his chest. He felt as though he was surrounded by the damp darkness of his grave. 

“I won’t sleep,” he murmured to himself, swallowing against the pain in his throat. Luckily, there were more pressing things to deal with than sleep, for the moment. Bracing one hand against the wall, he began to think. 

The first thing to deal with was the hunger. It gnawed painfully at the walls of his stomach with sharp, needle-like teeth. He was parched, too, his throat sore and dry. He had gulped several mouthfuls of water as it rained down on his face, ignoring the metallic taste. 

The second thing to deal with was his clothes. They were ragged and ripped, heavy with water and dirt, and no amount of sewing or washing would return them to their original state. 

And then he would need a name. 

He turned off the water, hands slipping on the dial. For a moment, he let the steam surround him as he stood there, breathing deeply, trying to keep calm. Then he stepped out of the shower, still shaky on his legs, and glanced around in search of towels. There were a few next to the sink, fluffy white things similar to the bathrobe Simon had thrown at him. He hadn’t wanted to make the bathrobe dirty, so he had left it off, despite the cold shivers that had danced up and down his spine.

He peeled off his wet clothes and let them drop to the floor with a slapping sound. The towel was warm and smelled vaguely of fruit. He couldn’t get used to the smells and the tastes in the air, and the sounds. There was so much to hear and see. He had kept the lights off in the bathroom, just using the light over the mirror to keep his eyes from stinging too much, but he could still see everything. The walls were all so white and the floors were cold and the tiles were slick and there was so much space, everywhere, enough that he could hold his arms out and spin around and around. 

A knock at the door surprised him, and he jerked around, almost dropping the towel. Eyes wide, he inched towards the door and cautiously unlocked it, opening it so that he could peer through the crack.

Alec stood there, his mouth pinched in a nervous line. “Hey.”

“Hello,” he said, a bit lost for words. His own voice sounded strange to him. He had almost forgotten how to use it. 

Alec’s mouth quirked curiously. He almost looked amused. “Hello. I brought you something. They probably won’t fit properly, but it’s better than nothing.” 

Alec handed over the bundle, squeezing it through the crack in the door and into his waiting hand. Then Alec looked at him properly, examining his face intently. 

“You look better,” Alec said. “A bit paler, but better.” 

He nodded, holding the towel up with one hand and the bundle with the other. 

“I feel clean,” he said, for lack of a better explanation. It was freeing, to lose the layer of dirt, like shedding a layer of skin. 

“Showers tend to do that,” Alec said, his mouth quirking again. Smiling, he realised, remembering the word. Alec was smiling. Not very big, or bright, but smiling nonetheless. “I’ll leave you to get dressed. There’s food out here when you’re ready.”

The door slipped shut again, and he stood for a moment. He clung to the bundle and contemplated his first real conversation in years. It hadn’t been very interesting, or stimulating, but there was something about simply being able to speak to someone that had set his heart racing. 

Eventually, the promise of food became too much to resist, and he hastily dropped the towel as he sorted through the bundle. It turned out to be a tank top, a pair of jeans and a large grey jumper. A rolled-up pair of socks broke free and bounced across the floor. He looked down at his own feet, which were bare. The nails wanted cutting, although not as much as he might have thought. The nails on his fingers were long too, but not too long either. He had nothing to gauge it on though – he didn’t know for certain how long he’d been buried for. 

The clothes hung off him, obviously belonging to someone taller and a bit wider, but they were strangely tight around his shoulders. He ran a hand down his stomach, which was flat and indented. He grazed his fingers over the ladders which made up his ribs, feeling each individual bump. He didn’t need a mind full of memories to know that he wasn’t in a healthy state. He felt weak and tired and small. 

Steam had filled the room during his shower, clouding the mirror. He wiped it clean with his towel and stared at his face. His reflection looked back at him a little wildly, illuminated by the small yellow light. His hair was a mass of dark brown tangles, made darker by the water. His skin was brown and freshly scrubbed. Long eyelashes fanned his cheekbones, which stood out prominently. His eyes were a deep brown, although when he shifted in the light, they seemed to flash a bright yellow. 

Another face filled the mirror. Startled, he whipped around, only to be greeted by an empty room. The shower hung there, the sheer plastic curtain tied in a knot to keep the water dripping onto the floor. Lumps of wet material splattered the floor, but there was no face.

It had been a sliver of a memory. 

He tried desperately to recall the face, but the memory was already fading. Frustrated, he frowned at the mirror and drummed his fingers against the sink. He had no idea who it could have been, although he thought he recognised those eyes as his own.

He turned away. 

The door creaked open when he pushed it, and he found Simon sleeping on the bed nearest the door, his face turned into the pillow as he snored lightly. 

“Hey,” Alec said again, from the other bed. He was perched on the edge of the coverlet, hands folded in his lap. 

He turned around, surprised by the voice. He blinked hazily at the square of darkness visible behind the net curtain. The window had been cracked open and a gust of cold air breezed in. 

“I didn’t know what you might like, and there wasn’t much to choose from,” Alec was saying, gesturing at the bed, where a pile of food lay waiting. “Vending machines don’t exactly offer a lot of variety. I raided three of them anyway, just don’t expect anything healthy. There are drinks too, although I didn’t get any coffee. I tried some and it tasted like tar. Simon was going to get you food, but he fell asleep.”

He sat down beside Alec slowly, folding one ankle over the other. The bed dipped beneath him, sending a few bars of chocolate rolling towards him. His stomach growled hungrily. Alec was openly staring at him now, although he blinked and looked away when he returned the stare. 

“You look a bit more human,” Alec blurted out. He winced immediately afterwards. “I mean, you look a bit less wild. Now that you’re clean, you know.” 

“I’ve been reliably informed that showers tend to do that,” he replied quietly. 

Alec furrowed his brow at him and then his mouth twisted into a grin. “Yeah, I’ve heard that too. Sorry that the clothes don’t fit, by the way. We don’t really have a lot of options.”

He shrugged. “They’re clean.” He reached for a packet and ripped it open. The contents smelled sweet. 

“Rice-cakes,” Alec said helpfully. “They’re good, but you should eat them quickly before Jace gets back. He loves them.”

He didn’t think he’d ever tried rice-cakes, but he was so hungry that he didn’t care if they tasted awful. His stomach groaned as he filled it rapidly with rice-cakes, followed by several bars of sweet and sticky chocolate, a few bags of crisps and several large bottles of water. 

Alec’s mouth was hanging open, and he looked vaguely impressed. “By the angel, it’s not going anywhere. Anyone would think you hadn’t been fed in years.”

He choked on his water, spraying it all down his jumper. He wiped his chin with the edge of the sleeve and avoided Alec’s gaze. He was beginning to regret eating so quickly, not just because he felt sick and bloated, but because it had obviously drawn attention to him. He sipped the water more slowly and fiddled with the blue ribbon that hugged his ring finger. 

“What’s that?” Alec asked, voice deliberately light. 

He glanced at him sharply and then looked down at the ribbon. It was a simple thing, a dark blue colour. The edge was frayed, but it had stayed tightly wrapped there for however long he had been under the ground. 

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” he murmured. “It feels important.” 

It was true. He had no idea what it was or who it belonged to, but it did feel important. He didn’t think he could bare to take it off. Throwing it away was unimaginable. 

“I get that,” said Alec, nodding, his hand drifting to his pocket. “You know, I called you a kid before, but I don’t know now. You look older. Before, you seemed like this wild thing we’d found in the earth, but now… I think you could be my age. Any memories yet? Got a name?”

Alec had one eyebrow raised in question, but his voice was soft, not probing. He sounded genuine. 

“No name yet. You’re a lot nicer than you were earlier,” he said slowly. “Were you mad?” 

“I’m not mad at you,” explained Alec, flushing slightly. He looked a little bit uncomfortable.

“Everyone seemed mad,” he said dubiously, thinking of the way Simon had snapped, of the off-hand way he had mentioned the other body and his clinical expression as he reeled off symptoms of trauma. 

Alec snorted softly. “Simon and Jace are always mad at each other. It’s something they do.’”

There was a pause as they both stared at each other. Alec had a pretty face, hazel eyes and sharp cheekbones, a strong jawline. He stared for a moment longer, until Alec flushed a little under his scrutiny and turned away. 

“I don’t think I remember anything,” he offered. “It’s strange. My head’s all empty.” 

Alec made a small, sympathetic noise. “Well, regardless of anything else, we can’t keep calling you nothing. You’ll need a name, even if it’s just a temporary one.” 

He looked at Alec, head tilted to the side. “You pick one.”

Alec looked taken aback. “What?”

“You pick one,” he said again.

Alec continued to stare at him. “You don’t want to pick your own name?” 

“Did you pick your name?”

Alec huffed a laugh, surprised. “Fair enough. And I suppose it’s only temporary, until you get your memory back. I’ll have a look for something.” Alec whipped his phone out of his pocket and began to tap away at the screen, whilst he sipped his water until the bottle was empty. Then he made a little pile out of all the empty wrappers, rubbing his stomach in the hopes that the sick feeling would go away. 

“I’ll just click a random one, if you like,” Alec offered awkwardly. 

He just smiled, waiting. It didn’t really matter what he was called. It mattered more what he could remember. 

Alec tapped his phone a few more times. “Okay, we’re on M. Marshall. Malik. Mark. Matthew. Magnus. Marwick.”

“Magnus,” he said. It tripped easily off of his tongue, like it belonged there. He felt warm down to his bones, as though someone had poured hot tea into his veins. His eyes felt hot for a moment, as though they were glowing. “Magnus.” 

“We can look for something else,” Alec suggested, but he shook his head. Magnus. Magnus sounded perfect.

“It’s perfect,” Magnus said. 

Alec grinned and Magnus hesitantly copied him. It felt awkward on his face, and he quickly dropped the expression, but Alec didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he slipped off the bed and grabbed a rucksack, rifling through it for a moment whilst Magnus watched. 

“I thought you might want to go outside,” said Alec, fishing out a pair of squashed trainers. He threw them at Magnus, who caught one by the shoelaces and dropped the other. “Try these on. They might be the wrong size, but we’ll get you new ones soon, if you like. If we ever find a town around here.” 

“Outside,” Magnus said quietly. Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to be here, in the room – he had to get outside, he had to see the sky and feel the wind on his skin. He wondered if the moon still looked like the moon. He had a vague impression of a silver circle in the sky, but nothing more.

In a frenzy, he yanked the trainers on over his feet, hands shaking. Alec watched him with an expression close to pity, an expression that Magnus didn’t like, and then sat back down on the bed. 

“I left the key on the bedside cabinet,” said Alec. “The door should lock itself when you leave, so take the key with you. Don’t get run over, or anything. Be careful.” He hesitated, like he wanted to add something, but by the time Magnus stood up, his face was blank and smooth again. 

“I’ll be back soon,” Magnus said. 

Alec waved a hand and yawned. Magnus could smell mint on him and something else, something that spoke of tiredness. He watched as he laid back on the bed, shoving the food aside, obviously intending to go to sleep. 

“Take your time. If you see Jace, kick him for me.”

Magnus decided not to ask if he was serious or not. Instead, he flew across the room, and snatched up the key-card, staggering a little. The shoes were a size or two too big, and he was still unused to walking. His legs didn’t feel like they would hold him up, but they did. 

The hotel was a little eerie at night. Everything was in various states of disrepair. The walls wanted painting and the floor was a bit sticky. It obviously hadn’t been cleaned in a while. He only put his hand to the stair rail once: Once was enough to warn him away from stair rails forever. 

Cautiously, Magnus made his way through the hotel, arriving at the front desk surprisingly quickly. Although, he thought, it wasn’t exactly a big place. They probably didn’t get many customers out here, secluded as it was. 

Something about the front desk unnerved him. It was brightly lit and humming with electricity, but there was something else about it. It dug into his chest and nestled there, this surety that something wasn’t right. He glanced around, but the place was sparsely decorated and empty of people. Even the receptionist had disappeared. 

Uneasily, he made his way out to the car park. The feeling of wrongness followed him until he reached the road. Magnus bit his lip and rubbed his hands against his jeans again. The movement comforted him a little, so he did it again, feeling the scratch of denim against his palms. 

The wind was cool and a welcome relief after his hot shower. It slipped over his face and teased his hair, and Magnus took deep lungful’s of air. He felt faintly victorious – he could breathe, properly, and he could walk and speak and open his eyes. He did not have to guess, to wonder, about whether he was dead or alive now. He felt it thrumming through him, energy and warmth and life. 

A lone car shot down the motorway, headlights on full beam. Magnus shielded his eyes with a wince. There were no other noises, nobody about. It was a lonely sort of night, and Magnus abruptly realised that he didn’t want to be alone, not even for a moment. He had been alone for long enough. 

He set off down the road in search of the bar and, hopefully, some company.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment and let me know what you thought, I'd really love to hear from you. And come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr if you like :) Thank you!


	4. The Boy in the Bar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The bar suddenly seemed to have an air of menace, of deadly, careful calm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! No warnings in this one either. Thank you for such wonderful comments on the last chapter! I really appreciate it. Hope you enjoy this one :)

The dive was a packed bar about half a mile down the street. Jace sat in a small booth in the far end of the building, where everyone could see him and where he could see the door. Even when he was on the road to being irresponsible, Jace was on guard. He had been on guard for at least two weeks, waiting for something impossible to happen. Expecting it, even. 

He didn’t look it, though. He looked as relaxed as it was possible for someone to look, leaning back in a lazy sprawl, arms thrown over the back of the booth, legs splayed. He knew he could fight in a split-second if he needed to, knew he could throw himself into action in the blink of an eye, but he was hoping that tonight would be a night for relaxation. They’d seen enough tonight. 

The booth stank of alcohol and cigarettes, the scent having sunk into the buttery leather. Despite the smoking ban, clouds of grey smoke pirouetted up towards the dirty ceiling from joints that lingered between lazy fingers. Bikers in leather jackets and tall girls in small skirts, tattooed folk and men with dark clothes and a darker smile, all smoking and drinking and laughing quietly with each other. 

Jace was unbothered. He didn’t particularly fit in with the crowd, with his denim jacket and long fringe, with his handsome, square features and blank skin, but he did love it. There was something tempting about the way they all looked, a little dangerous and a bit edgy. It drew Jace in, hypnotised him.

The clink of glasses drew nearer. An impatient waitress took his order for two beers with an cross look before she stormed away, towers of unfinished drinks swaying on her tray. Jace stared after her, eyes fixed decidedly lower than was necessary. 

He picked at the hem of his jacket as he watched the door. Somebody pushed it open. For a moment, the figure stood on the doorstep, one hand still smashed up against the glass of the door. The bell above it was half-caught against the lip of the wood, an open mouth ready to shriek. Jace frowned as the guy shook himself and then turned his head this way and that, obviously looking for someone. 

His head twisted in Jace’s direction. Jace glanced away, ducking down a little in the booth. _Be on guard_ , he told himself firmly. His fingers shook as he drummed them against his leg, unable to keep still with all the anticipation that filled him up. 

The boy from the grave dropped into the seat opposite him. 

Jace swore lowly. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”

The boy blinked at him. He wasn’t a boy so much as a man, about Alec’s age – it was easy to see now that the dirt had been sluiced off, revealing dark skin and angular features. Jace couldn’t help but notice how strange his eyes were. They almost looked yellow in the light.

“You have heart problems?” he inquired curiously. Then he tacked on, as an afterthought, “Sorry. The others were falling asleep. I needed some fresh air.”

He talked in curt sentences, quick and blunt. Maybe it was because he didn’t like talking, or maybe it was to stop his throat from hurting. Jace remembered an unhappy time in a swimming pool during his secondary school years, when he had slipped off the side and plunged into the pool, inhaling a gallon of water. His throat had hurt for hours, after, just from coughing. 

“It’s an expression,” Jace said. “The heart attack thing. It just means that you scared the shit out of me, that’s all. And I don’t blame you. I’d be starving for fresh air if I’d been … well, you know.” 

Jace grimaced. He imagined that anybody would need fresh air after being buried alive in an empty field. He wouldn’t be surprised if the boy avoided small, dark spaces for the rest of his life. 

It was wrong, but Jace was morbidly curious, his tongue heavy with questions. He wanted to know what the guy had done to deserve such a horrible end. He wanted to know who had put him in the ground. He wanted to know how it had happened. 

“You can ask questions, you know,” the guy said. His eyes wouldn’t keep still, rattling over the bar and the flashy arcade machine, and the crowds of people who kept glancing at him out of the corner of their eye. “I won’t mind.”

“I thought you couldn’t remember anything?” 

He shrugged. “Doesn’t mean you can’t ask. You look like you want to.”

Jace filed that away for later use. He did want to ask, but he wasn’t sure that he would like the answers. If the man suddenly remembered something, it was probably better to have someone like Alec there, or Simon. Someone caring, someone who knew what to say. 

“So, Zombie, any idea what you’re going to do now?”

The boy furrowed his brow. “Zombie? Oh.” His expression cleared a little. “The things that come back to life. Clever. I have a name though.”

“Let’s hear it, then,” said Jace, arching an eyebrow. 

“Magnus,” said the boy, smiling with just a hint of teeth. 

“Not bad,” Jace said, tilting his head to the side. “Nowhere near as elegant as Jace, of course. I’m still going to stick with Zombie though, for lack of a creative streak. You nearly died. Close enough for me.”

_Tactful_ , said the sardonic voice inside his head. 

Magnus didn’t look offended, though. He looked thoughtful. A wry little smile took over his mouth. “You don’t know the half of it.”  
B  
efore Jace had time to ponder what that meant, the waitress returned. She slammed a round tray down against the table, the two bottles of beer on top of it rattling dangerously. Jace retrieved a gritty bill from his wallet, which was faded and flaking apart. Once, when he was very, very drunk, he had told a girl that his wallet represented him on the inside, dark and falling apart. She had slapped him, but as far as anyone else knew, the line had worked perfectly. 

He handed the bill to the waitress, making sure to let their fingers brush against each other. She glanced up, heavily pencilled eyebrows rising as she looked at his face. A faint blush bloomed beneath the layer of foundation. She had lovely eyes and big, plump lips. Jace let a smirk steal across his face, aware that both the woman and Magnus were watching him keenly. It was always a rush, being wanted. 

The waitress walked back to the bar with a little more sway in her hips and a little less tension in her shoulders. 

“I was expecting Alec,” Jace said, indicating the spare beer. “But since he’s busy doing his best impression of a coma patient, you can take his place.”

Magnus frowned at the beer. Jace took a long pull of his own drink; it warmed his throat on the way down. 

“I would have thought you’d jump all over that offer, considering you were buried and then passed out all over us. What’s the matter? Don’t you drink?”

Magnus shrugged delicately. “I’m not exactly sure that… _this_ , is to my taste. Why were you waiting for Alec?”

“Alec likes to keep an eye on us, mostly,” Jace said, indulging him. “He’s my older brother, so he’s always felt some sort of responsibility towards me. Apparently, I don’t make good decisions when I’m drunk.” 

He gave a fake, bright smile to convey how stupid he thought the notion was. 

“You and Alec are related?” Magnus asked, looking shocked. 

Jace straightened. “Yes. Is that a problem?”

Magnus looked thoughtful, the shock fading from his face. “Not at all. My apologies if I offended you. I simply didn’t expect it.”

Jace eyed him suspiciously, and then shrugged, taking another gulp of his drink. He never liked when people looked at him and Alec as though they couldn’t possibly be related. He and Alec were family, in all the ways that counted, and it didn’t matter that they didn’t share the same blood. 

Jace shook himself, and tuned back into the conversation. 

“Alec still comes with you? Even though he doesn’t drink?” Magnus dragged the bottle towards him and examined it critically, like a scientist observing someone else’s findings, turning it this way and that. Then he began to pick the label off the glass. Jace grimaced when he spotted the long, rounded fingernails. 

“Like I said, he likes to keep an eye on us. Have you finished with the questions?” 

Magnus didn’t blush. He didn’t even look ashamed. He just stared at Jace curiously, like he was trying to see what made him tick. 

“You can ask some in return, you know.”

“So, who buried you, then?”

Magnus fumbled the bottle, sending it rolling towards Jace. An amber river spilled across the table, and Jace quickly snatched the bottle up and held it aloft. They both grimaced at the mess, and then Jace tapped a guy in the neighbouring booth on the shoulder and asked for the cloth that the barmaid had left behind. Once the table was relatively clean, Jace abandoned the sodden cloth and started on the remaining half of Magnus’s beer. 

Either Magnus didn’t know, or he didn’t want them to know. He turned his head to stare at the people dotted all around the bar, ignoring Jace’s curious stare. Jace knew he probably shouldn’t have asked, and he definitely should have been more tactful, but the question had surged up out of nowhere. Simon often called Jace a blunt bastard. Simon called Jace a lot of things, and none of them were flattering. 

“You did say that I could ask questions,” Jace pointed out.

“Not that one,” said Magnus quietly. “I don’t remember, anyway.”

Jace was good with people. Not in the way where he could comfort them or empathise them, or get them to spill the darkest secrets, but in the way where he didn’t need to. Bodies were something he understood. Their language spoke to him. A wink or a smirk or the smallest pupil dilation was like a sentence in a book. A tick in the jaw or a twitch of an eye was a portion of a story. 

Magnus was unreadable. His face was an open book, but it was written in a language that Jace didn’t understand. 

Jace had not been lying back in the hotel. He hadn’t understood why the boy hadn’t looked even a bit grateful for being rescued. Had he thanked them at all? Jace couldn’t remember. Jace didn’t want gratitude, not really, but gratitude would have made sense. It would have been a normal reaction, a natural, human response to being saved. 

Of course, there was also the matter of the other body. Maybe Magnus didn’t think he could trust them. That made the most sense, considering how little they knew of each other. Hell, Jace wouldn’t have trusted them, not with all the secrecy and the possible murder hanging over their heads. Magnus just knew that they were potentially killers as well as rescuers. 

A shiver ran up Jace’s spine. 

There was a squeal of creaking hinges, and then the door to the bar slammed against the opposite wall with a loud, echoing crash, jolting Jace from his thoughts. 

“What is it?” asked Magnus. 

When Jace looked back across the table, Magnus was clearly waiting for him to speak. He had his hands tucked up into the sleeves of his jumper so that just the fingertips were visible, one eyebrow raised as he leaned forward. 

“Jace?” It was the first time that Magnus had said Jace’s name. Even the strange, foreign shock of it was not enough to divert Jace’s attention back to him. He had just caught sight of the person striding in through the open door of the bar. It was a tall figure, dressed in heavy black material black. No, Jace realised, peering closer, it wasn’t black. It was extremely dark red, the colour of dried blood. 

“What is it?” 

Jace held up a finger, eyes fixed on figure. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, if they were tall or short, what they looked like. They seemed almost shapeless, and yet something about them drew the eye. Everyone’s eyes followed them up across the room, the chatter quieting down until it was merely a murmur. Jace couldn’t bring himself to look away. 

The figure made its way to the bar. A hood obscured its face, but as it turned to summon the barman, Jace caught a glimpse of white, like a shard of bone. 

Jace swore under his breath, and then he looked at Magnus and mouthed get down. Immediately, Magnus sank down the length of the booth and disappeared from view. Jace dragged both bottles of beer towards him and slipped out of sight. He crouched on the floor next to Magnus in the dark recess beneath the table, amongst the wads of chewing gum and crumpled receipts. Jace placed the beers down as quietly as he could and grimaced when his hand landed in something questionable. He glanced down at the filthy floor and pulled a disgusted face. He wiped his hand on Magnus’s jumper. Magnus didn’t notice. 

“Who did you see?” Magnus whispered, moving forward to peer out into the bar. Jace pulled him back by the collar of his jumper. Then he shuffled forward and glanced out quickly. The figure was still there, at the bar. The barman was there too, frowning and gesturing towards the front window, where a couple of neon signs flickered and sputtered. 

“It was more like _what_ did I see,” Jace murmured. Next to him, Magnus hugged himself tightly, nervous and unsure. Jace leaned back until he could only see the figure’s feet, which were clad in massive black boots. The cloak came to a frayed end about an inch from the floor. “What kind of person wears a cloak in this day and age?” 

“What are you talking about?” Magnus tried to lean forward again, but Jace pulled him back, rougher this time. 

“I don’t know,” Jace hissed. “Stop moving. I don’t want us to get spotted, okay?”

There was no chance of that, though. The pair of boots turned, squeaking against the old black floorboards. There was a tinkle as the bell above the door chimed, and then the door closed behind it. 

All at once, the people in the bar began to murmur and whisper. Jace hadn’t even noticed their silence until it was gone. It seemed as if it wasn’t just Jace who found the figure suspicious, although he had his own reasons. 

“Did you see it?” Jace asked, clambering up out of the booth. The figure was nowhere in sight, not even through the window. It was possible that it had just gone the other way, but it was equally as possible that it had moved swiftly past the window, down towards the hotel. 

“The big cloaked guy that came in a minute ago,” Magnus confirmed, squeezing out from under the table. He looked a little dishevelled, and several customers were giving them looks. “I saw him. I think everyone saw him. Why?” 

“I don’t know what it was, but I think we need to follow it, just to make sure.” Jace slipped past Magnus, ducking quickly between the occupants that were beginning to gather in the bar. He felt a little bit closed in. More than a few people were watching him intently. He couldn’t wait to leave. The bar suddenly seemed to have an air of menace, of deadly, careful calm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment and let me know what you thought, I'd really love to hear from you. And come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr if you like :) Thank you!


	5. The Boy in Trouble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A scream shattered the silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so there's an implied, off-screen death in this scene, and you see some descriptions of blood, so if that squees you out, please don't read, but I promise it's not graphic, just mentioned. I don't know how well this chapter works, but it's necessary, so I hope you enjoy it! There will be more soon!

Blackness greeted them outside, thick and heavy with tension. With it came a wash of frigid air that bit at the slices of skin visible at his collar and wrists, where the borrowed clothes hung loosely. Magnus shivered and wrapped his arms around his middle. It was harder to run like that, but he ran nonetheless. 

Jace was faster than Magnus. He sprinted like death itself was nipping at his heels, swearing all the while. Magnus tried to keep up, but he was too sick from the food and too weak to keep the same pace. He settled into a jog instead, fighting to keep the other boy in his sight. 

The hotel was maybe half a mile down from the bar, nestled in off the motorway, at the end of a worn dirt track. They ran along the side of the road, on the dead, trampled heather that separated the tarmac from the broken fencing that surrounded fields of lush grass. 

Magnus was breathing heavily by the time the orange glow of the hotel sign winked into view. Jace skidded to an abrupt stop without warning, and Magnus slammed into the other boy, sending them both sprawling in the dirt. 

Magnus landed on his front, winded. He tried to catch his breath, listening to Jace groan and swear beside him, cursing Magnus’ name. He could feel something wet on the side of his face, and prayed it was the rain that was beginning to fall and not blood. Levering himself up onto his knees, Magnus staggered to a stand and held one hand out to Jace. The darkness had wrapped itself around the other boy and rendered him almost invisible. 

“Whatever it was in the bar, I haven’t seen it out here,” Jace said, accepting Magnus’s hand and heaving himself upright. Then he glared accusingly at Magnus. “Although it’s hard to see anything with your face in the dirt.”

“Sorry,” said Magnus absently, eyes fixed on the hotel. “I didn’t see anyone either. He either moved fast or he didn’t come this way.”

“I’m going to give you one piece of advice, totally free of charge,” said Jace grimly. “Don’t assume that everything is what you think it is. Not while you’re with the three of us, anyway.”

If Magnus hadn’t been used to dark things, dark feelings, he probably would have found that somewhat chilling. Instead, the rightness of it settled within him like a lock clicking into place. 

“You don’t think it’s a person,” Magnus said slowly, with some measure of triumph. It was mad, but as soon as he said the words, he sensed the truth in them.

“Like I said,” Jace said, shifting uncomfortably. “Don’t assume.”

He wouldn’t look at Magnus. Magnus followed his gaze, eyes flicking all over the front of the hotel. 

A shadow fluttered to life in the doorway to the hotel. Most of the windows were dark but the front desk was almost visible from outside, alight with a yellow fluorescent bulb. 

“I saw something,” Magnus whispered. His heart stuttered in his chest. He wondered if this was something that the other three went through often. He seriously hoped that it wasn’t, but he had a bad feeling in his stomach.

“The car isn’t here,” Jace said suddenly. Magnus bit his lip. He hadn’t seen their car, or even been aware of its existence until now. He remembered being in the back seat, briefly, but everything was a little fuzzy. They both gazed around the parking lot. There were a few cars there, sleeping quietly in their spaces. Magnus didn’t know what to look for. 

Jace swore, raking a hand violently through his hair. 

“Have you tried calling them?” Magnus whispered. “Simon was on his phone earlier.” 

Another shadow flickered across the double doors into the hotel. It moved quickly, almost too quickly to be a person. 

“I don’t have my phone. I left it in my bag.” 

Magnus rubbed his hands along his jeans. “Maybe they took it for a drive.”

“You said Alec was asleep,” Jace hissed. “He never sleeps anymore, so I don’t think a joyride was on either of their minds.”

Magnus filed that away for later. “Even so, if the car is gone, then they’re probably gone too, aren’t they? Maybe they drove up to the bar to find us.” 

Jace hesitated, and then nodded. “I guess. We should wait here, then. They should turn around soon, once they realise we aren’t in the bar anymore.” 

A scream shattered the silence. 

Without thinking, Magnus crouched low and sprinted towards the parked cars, oblivious to Jace’s yelp of surprise. He darted behind the first one he saw, a small red model with a scratch along the side, and waited for Jace to catch up. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” Jace demanded, as soon as he reached Magnus. Magnus thought it was pretty obvious, but he explained anyway. 

“You saw someone dangerous. Now somebody’s screaming. We can’t just walk away. What if someone’s hurt?” 

“Who knows what I saw, alright? It could have just been some hideously ugly man. I know I’d hide like that if I didn’t have a face worth looking at.”

Magnus ignored Jace and slunk out from behind the car, sinking down in the shadows by the next one. There was one car left between them and the front door. 

“It’s not worth all of this just to get beat up by some ugly fucker,” Jace hissed, breathing hard. Magnus was so caught up that he barely noticed the stitch in his side, or the hitch in his breathing. “You said it yourself, Alec and Simon probably aren’t even in there.” 

Magnus ignored this, too. There had been more than two people in the hotel, and just because Magnus didn’t know any of them didn’t mean he was just going to let them get hurt. His heart was thundering. The closer they got to the doors, the brighter it became. Magnus stood up once more, taking the last few strides to the last car. 

A square of light spilled out onto the tarmac. The reception was dimly lit, but Magnus could see the front desk, the brackets full of pamphlets and the old, blocky computer. There was no sign of the receptionist, or the figure they had been chasing. 

“C’mon,” Magnus whispered, edging his way around the car. 

“Have you gone mad?” Jace hissed furiously, making a grab for his shoulder. 

Magnus ducked out of the way and Jace’s hand swiped through thin air. The front doors were glass, and opened smoothly, revealing a silent, abandoned room. Blinking in the sudden light, Magnus took a step forward through the doors, heedless of Jace’s foul language. He glanced around but there was nobody there. There was nobody on the stairs, or in the corridor behind the desk. The silence was unnerving. 

“We should go upstairs,” Magnus murmured. “Maybe that man didn’t come in here. He must have gone the other way.’”

“Somebody give the boy a medal for having absolutely no self-preservation,” Jace snarled, storming into the building and letting the doors snap shut behind him. “We didn’t dig you up only for you to piss off and die, you ridiculous–” 

Magnus didn’t get to find out what he was. Jace broke off and made an odd, low noise in his throat. He sounded pained. Magnus wheeled around to stare at him, surprised. 

Jace was a pale, sickly colour, and his expression was stony, closed off between one minute and the next. He raised a hand and jabbed a finger harshly at the desk. Confusion gave way to apprehension, and then horror, as Magnus crept closer to the desk. 

The wall behind the desk was painted with a fresh swathe of blood. It splattered the cream wallpaper, dripped down to the tiled floor and pooled there, like spilled wine. Magnus didn’t know how he had missed it. The desk chair, a little thing with squeaky wheels, had been ripped apart. The back hung loosely off the frame, snapped in half. There was stuffing all over the floor, and more blood coated the remains. 

Magnus swallowed thickly. It was an awful lot of blood. 

Cautiously, Magnus circled the desk. He didn’t think he could handle seeing a body, maybe one as broken as the chair, but when he looked there was no one there. Everything on the desk was still in its rightful place. The computer was still on, humming lowly as the internet kicked into life. 

“It can’t have happened very long ago,” Magnus murmured, watching the page on the screen load. 

“There’s blood in that corridor,” Jace said gruffly. He still looked ill and he was shaking slightly, but he was moving, talking. Jace jerked his head at the long tiled hallway behind him, the one that led to the stairs. “Not much of it, just a few drops. It leads upstairs.”

Whatever had done this had headed upstairs. Possibly it was still there. Magnus didn’t know why he had barely questioned Jace’s warning about assumptions, but it was surprisingly easy to stop making the jump from person to thing in his mind. 

He looked at the blood again, at the destroyed chair. It was more animal than human. 

He met Jace’s eyes across the space between them. Magnus took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and headed for the corridor. 

A loud trill broke the strained silence. Magnus stumbled to a stop and Jace ran into him, swearing.

“My phone,” Jace whispered. “I must have left it in my jacket after all.” Jace fumbled for it frantically, pressing the call button. 

“We’re in the car park,” Simon hissed. His voice was crackly and tinny. Magnus let out a short, sharp breath, giddy with relief. “Hurry up.” The line went dead as Simon hung up the phone. 

In the corridor, something creaked. 

With a burst of speed that surprised even himself, Magnus raced towards the double doors, grabbing Jace as he passed, and yanking him out of the hotel. They both screeched to a halt in the parking lot as a small black car rumbled up to the curb. 

“Get in,” Alec shouted, flicking the lock for the back doors. 

Jace wrenched open the door and shoved Magnus into the back seat before diving in after him. They landed in a sprawled heap, tangled together, and the Toyota pulled away before Jace could even close the door. 

“I wish you would buy a faster car,” Simon hissed. He was clenching the handle above the passenger door like a lifeline. “I’d feel a lot safer.”

“Are you hurt?” Alec demanded, ignoring him. They had pulled off the dirt track and were speeding towards the motorway, away from the bar. Magnus was slumped awkwardly across two seats, half-underneath Jace, so he scooted over and buckled himself in, hands fumbling with the belt. He was breathing hard, the leftover rush of adrenaline still surging through him. Jace didn’t seem much better off; his head lolled against the back seat as he sat up and fiddled with the seatbelt. 

“I’m fine,” Jace said, waving a hand. “If you count being scared out of your mind as fine.” 

Alec’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Magnus?”

At first, Magnus didn’t realise that Alec was talking to him. It was still unusual, to know that the name belonged to him now. It was even more unusual to realise that Alec was worried about him. 

“I’m not hurt,” Magnus said stiltedly. The words felt like ash in his mouth, and his head had begun to ache. 

“Well, that’s a lie,” Simon said tightly. He wasn’t looking at any of them, which gave Magnus a chance to stare. He hadn’t quite gotten used to eye contact yet. Simon’s glasses were askew, and his hair was mussed, as if he had been running his fingers through it. 

“What do you mean?” Alec asked sharply. The little car put on a new burst of speed. Magnus clutched at the door handle. He couldn’t recall the last time he had been in a car properly. He knew they had brought him to the hotel in this one, but it was all a strange black haze that evaded him if he tried to think about it too hard. 

He ran a hand over the soft seat, marvelling at the vibrations. Receipts littered the floor by his feet, and the corner of a pizza box peeked out from under the passenger seat. There was a green tree swinging from the rear-view mirror that gave off a musky, artificially sweet scent. Alec continued to glance at all of the mirrors, searching for any signs of pursuit. 

“What do you mean?” Alec demanded again, when nobody spoke. 

“Magnus is bleeding,” Simon explained. 

“It’s not mine,” Magnus said dully, holding his hand up. He felt distant, almost unmoored. His fingers were slicked in blood from the desk, from where he had leaned briefly against the surface. “That receptionist. It must have been her. Whatever that thing was, it tore her apart.”

For a fraction of a second, Alec’s eyes fluttered closed, grief obvious in the lines on his face. The little car jerked. Magnus was startled into silence. The other two tensed up, sharing a brief look, and Magnus pursed his lips together in regret. Obviously, Magnus had accidentally stumbled across something painful. 

The second passed, and Alec’s eyes were on the road again, back on his mirrors. 

“I didn’t mean that blood,” Simon muttered.

“He meant your face,” Jace said quietly. He leaned over and poked at a point just below Magnus’s cheekbone, finger digging into the soft skin. Magnus’s cheek began to sting, suddenly, as if Jace’s touch had brought him to life again. Magnus lifted his clean hand up and pressed it gently against the side of his face. It came away tacky with blood. 

“I must have cut it when I fell down,” Magnus mumbled. The tangy scent of blood hit his nose and he quickly wiped his hand off on his jeans. He felt a bit sick, but at least it didn’t hurt too badly. 

“Adrenaline,” said Simon. “It’s pretty powerful stuff. There are cases of people coming away from fights and not even realising that they’ve got broken bones or a stab wound. One woman got stabbed in the back of the neck and walked all the way to work without even realising. How awesome is that?”

Awesome wasn’t the word that Magnus would use. Jace snorted, muttered something that sounded like, “Typical.” 

“Are you alright?” Alec said softly, staring at Magnus in the mirror. Magnus felt his mouth drop open a little in surprise, and then he nodded somewhat stiffly. Nobody had ever spoken to him like that before, not in his memory. “Good. We’ll get you cleaned up soon.”

Rain began to throw itself at the car, splattering the windows. A soft click indicated Alec had turned on the windscreen wipers, but Magnus was almost too tired to focus. He saw a sign, then, at the side of the road, illuminated fleetingly by the headlights as they poured by. 

“Where are we going to go now?” Simon asked quietly. Magnus saw Jace shrug, heard Alec mutter something back, something inaudible. Magnus let his head rest against the window and watched raindrops chase each other down the cool glass. 

He didn’t dare fall asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Honestly if you're still reading this, I'm really grateful, and if you're new then hi! Welcome! Drop me a comment and let me know what you thought regardless, and come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr, I'd really love to hear from you. Thanks a bunch!


	6. The Boy on the Farm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sleepy hum emitted from within the hives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More chapter-y goodness! Thank you for all the lovely comments, I really appreciate it. I may not update for a couple of days because college sucks, but I have more chapters waiting! No warnings for this one, apart from swearing, I think. Thank you so much! Enjoy :)

_The buzzing of bees is prominent, but there is another sound hidden underneath it, like an odd whirring. It is the sound of old machinery, of rusted gears and clattering cogs. The wind blows the scent of petrol over the dry, parched land. It is a strong wind, died down to a wisp of what it was the night before last. The night before last, a tree had been uprooted, and slate tiles had skated down from the roof in pairs._

_The earth is thirsty. The rain that falls is not enough to quench its’ thirst, to feed the land. Crops grow dusty and die._

_A candle on the porch shrinks in on itself, burning slowly, the only light for miles. It is a thin purple votive, the kind that lingers in the corners of churches, surrounded by soft whispers and desperate prayers. Lonesome; it looks like a salute to someone. A salute to someone who is all at once lost, and dead, and gone, someone who maybe never existed at all._

Magnus frowned, eyes fluttering open. 

They had driven through the last of the night, into morning. Cars peeled past them on the highway, briefly illuminated by foggy headlights. As the first few rays of sunlight began to tip through the car windows, the little Toyota pulled into a siding and shuddered to a halt. 

Magnus had been dozing – not sleeping; every time he closed his eyes properly he felt the tug of the earth, like his abandoned grave was calling to him – but now he jolted awake properly. He had been listening, groggily, as Simon explained how they had escaped out of the hotel. There were dark shadows beneath Simon’s eyes, thrown into focus in the artificial light from the car. 

“We heard a scream. We grabbed our stuff and went out to the staircase, but there wasn’t anyone there. I was going to go downstairs, but we could hear this noise, like a whirring sound.”

Magnus sat up. Whirring. The odd drowsy dream, fading as it was, lingered at the edge of his subconscious. It had not quite been a dream. It was almost as if it had come from somewhere else, as if it were not a product of his own mind, like something outside of him had pushed it through his ears and told him to watch and listen. 

He must have dreamed often, before. What else was there to do in a grave? Sleep was never that restful, even when you were supposed to be dead. He wondered what his mind had done with them, these not-quite-dreams. Maybe they were still there, in the back of his head, waiting to be plucked out and watched, like a collection of old videos. 

“We doubled back,” Alec said, taking over for Simon. “There was a fire escape at the end of the corridor, and we climbed out into it. The stairs inside were still in view, so we saw it come up.” Alec glanced hesitantly at Simon, mouth pulled down in an unsure frown. 

Simon made an impatient noise. “Alec seems to think it wasn’t a man. Or a woman. Despite the fact that it would have been impossible for an animal to have done what this thing did, and there’s no evidence that it wasn’t a person.” 

Jace glanced at Magnus. Magnus wondered if the other boy wanted him to speak, or if he was willing him to keep quiet. Alec rolled his eyes, talking over Simon sarcastic dismissal before Magnus could come to a decision. 

“Anyway, the thing came up the stairs slowly. It had this sack slung over its shoulder and there was something dripping from it. It left a trail, all the way from one end of the corridor to the other, where it started opening the first door.” Alec grimaced. “We ran down the fire escape, went to the car and drove off to find you two. We figured you must have gone back to the hotel when we couldn’t find you in the bar.”

Something cold and heavy lodged itself in the bottom of Magnus’s stomach, like an anvil. He closed his eyes, saw the splatter of crimson blood against fading wallpaper and shuddered. He could smell it, still, the acrid scent of blood and fear. 

“A sack?” Jace asked. His voice was thin, a little reedy. He looked nothing like the confident persona he usually projected. “You’re sure it was a sack?”

Alec winced as a car drove past them, and said distractedly, “I don’t know, it just looked all floppy and weird. It could have been something else, I guess. Is that really the important part?”

Simon narrowed his eyes. “Why are you asking? What do you think it was?”

Magnus wiped a hand over his face. The receptionist. 

He swallowed past the lump in his throat. He had only seen the receptionist for a few short seconds before slinking away with the others to let Alec talk with her. She had been a small, compact woman wearing an abundance of lipstick. Her red hair had been scraped back into a bun. She hadn’t trusted them, that much had been obvious.

“We didn’t find a body,” Jace said slowly, glancing at Magnus again. “Down at the front desk. There was just a lot of blood.” 

It seemed to take a moment to sink in. When it did, Alec’s eyes rounded to the size of coins, coppery in the little light the day had shared with them. Both he and Simon made small noises of horror and dismay. 

“The receptionist,” Simon hissed. “Not a sack. He was carrying a person.”

“I don’t even remember her name,” Alec said hollowly. 

In silence, the four of them leaned back against their seats. The revelation had shocked them, although a part of Magnus felt as if he had known the whole time, since he had heard the first scream. He wondered what the killer would do with the body. Bury it in someone else’s grave, perhaps, he thought bitterly. 

One thing was for sure; these boys didn’t seem like the kind to offhandedly bury a body. Their shock and horror was palpable in the air. Magnus pondered, again, over whether he could trust them. They had not left him behind, at the hotel, or before, in the field. Alec had given him food and clothes, and a name, Simon had given him reassurance, and Jace had given him company and honesty. He honestly did not know how he felt about them, besides being grateful, and wary. 

They stayed in the car for about another hour, dozing, watching cars pass them by. It was still in the very early hours of the morning, and the sky was not yet blue, but rather a lavender colour, devoid of sunlight. A few tenacious stars winked at them. 

“You said you know a place where we can stay?” Alec asked quietly. He had woken up minutes ago after falling asleep against the wheel, and now he was swivelled around in his seat, rummaging through his bag in search of a protein bar. They were all hungry, Magnus the most of all, but proper food would have to wait until they were safe again. Simon had his legs up on the dashboard and was fiddling with the radio, which alternated between Radio 4 and a crackle of white noise. Magnus would rather listen to the white noise. Jace was asleep, head flopping against his shoulder. 

“I think so,” said Simon, and Magnus must have missed that part of the conversation. Simon was scrolling through his phone, tapping at the screen with a frown that Magnus could see reflected in the wing mirror. “There isn’t much in these parts, but this map says that there’s a Bed and Breakfast not far from here. It’s attached to a farm, apparently.”

Jace groaned, and Magnus looked at him in surprise. 

“I hate farms,” Jace muttered. “They stink, and there’s always some God-awful animal waking you up in the morning by howling or something.”

“How many farms have you stayed on?” Magnus asked curiously. 

Jace cut him an affronted look. “None, but I own a television. Learn all you need to know about the outside world from the safety of your own home.”

Simon snickered. “That explains so much, if your first point of reference is a television.”

“Your first point of reference is a comic book, Lewis, so don’t get too cocky.”

“Shut up, both of you,” Alec said, sighing. “Just tell me which way to go, Simon.”

They began to drive again, with Simon throwing out orders every few seconds, and Alec following them quietly. Something about it felt familiar, but Magnus couldn’t put his finger on what it was. It itched at him, but his mind remained blank. He stared out of the window, and as they passed a large sign and began to slow down, he made a small noise. 

Magnus caught Simon’s inquisitive gaze in the wing mirror, but then a second passed, and Simon looked away. He seemed reluctant to look at Magnus unless he had too. Even when they had shared the pile of food, Magnus had noticed it. 

“What’s up with you?” Jace asked, opening one eye. 

“Felt familiar,” Magnus said quietly, gesturing at the window. A moment later, the feeling passed, leaving him oddly bereft. 

“You might be starting to remember some things,” Simon said. “You already remembered your name, after all.”

Alec looked at him, sharply, holding his gaze for a few seconds, as if to ask why Magnus had lied. Magnus offered him a raised shoulder in return. He hadn’t really lied, after all, he had just told Jace that he had a name now, and Jace had passed the information on to Simon. 

Just before he looked away, a memory flickered to life in Magnus’s mind. A sliver of an image, just the front of a house. The sound of a tractor roaring to life. Soft, lovely hands with purple-painted nails.

He inhaled sharply and stared out of the window as the car pulled into a turning. 

Alec turned around in his seat, one hand still on the wheel, and watched him intently for a moment. His eyes were always intense, Magnus noticed, always shining with a sense of purpose. Although the rest of him drooped with fatigue and tiredness, his eyes glittered with life. They were the colour of warm chocolate. 

“If you’re sure you’re alright,” Alec said eventually, “we’re going to try this Bed and Breakfast. Or, if you would prefer, we can look for a hospital and drop you off there. I should have asked sooner, but we were all a little… preoccupied.”

“I don’t care where the hell we go as long as it’s more comfortable than this car,” Jace grumbled. He was still slumped down with the air of someone who had collapsed and had no intention of getting up again for the next five years.

_Drop you off._ They wouldn’t be staying with him, that much was certain. If he chose the hospital, took the sensible option, he would be alone. That cinched it for Magnus. It might have been stupid, to choose the company of three near-strangers over medical help and a safe place to stay, but Magnus didn’t want to be alone again. 

“I’ll stay,” Magnus said quietly. 

Alec watched him for a moment longer, and then smiled faintly before turning back around. Magnus couldn’t tell if that was a good sign or not. 

“Do I just keep driving?” Alec said uncertainly, gesturing with one hand at the windscreen. Stretched out in front of them was a narrow dirt track and several long, rolling fields of green. It wasn’t a view that Magnus’s companions would be used to, he realised. They reeked of city life, of tall, impressionable buildings and paving stones smothered in chewing gum, of bright lights in the night and smog that rose indolently to mingle with the clouds. The city might have been home to a few parks and greens, but those were for people to stroll through, to enjoy on sunny days. They weren’t for necessity, for growth and life. 

He wondered how he knew these things. 

These fields were lush green with sparse patches of brown where the rain hadn’t quite kicked in yet, edged with hedges overflowing with nettles and wild flowers and berries. A flurry of trees led the way. There were no streetlights up here, but every few yards, a blue lantern cast a circle of light, swinging gently from the branches of the trees. 

“It’s right at the end of the track,” Simon said, consulting his phone.

Magnus rolled down the window. The sweet scents of rain and dew and cut grass drifted into the car, and Magnus inhaled it gratefully. It was stuffy in the car. He began to feel an ember of excitement, the kind that came at the beginning of a journey to somewhere that you knew was full of life and fun, like a kid on the way to a theme park. 

“Magnus, you couldn’t get your head any further out of that window if you tried,” Jace observed. “You look like a Labrador.” 

Magnus frowned. “I’m not a dog. Or blonde.” 

“No,” Jace agreed with amusement, “but you are a very literal bastard. Being the handsome, loveable blonde is my job. You look like you love it here though, is what I meant.”

Magnus turned to look at him properly. He had a ridiculous beanie pulled down over his dramatic fringe to keep out the cold, and he was patting his pockets, probably in search of his phone. Behind his eyes, there was intrigue. 

“I think I do,” Magnus admitted. “I feel like I do.”

He fiddled with his sleeve. There was blood there, at the hem, dry and flaky now. His hand was mostly clean, although there was a dark red stain up the side of his thumb, and his face was probably still a little messed up. It was hard to clean up with just a handful of antiseptic wipes and his foggy reflection in the window.

“So, not a city boy then?” asked Jace, flipping the lid up on his cigarette packet. Alec made a small noise of disapproval, whether at the question or the smoking, Magnus didn’t know, but Jace ignored him. Smoke rings filled the back of the car as Magnus let the question settle, unsure of how to answer it. 

Somehow, he knew what a city was, even if he couldn’t picture a specific one properly, or put a name to one, but in the same way, he knew he didn’t belong there. It was all very peculiar. 

“I didn’t know you smoked,” Magnus said instead. 

Jace twisted his mouth into a mockery of a smile. “Only when I’m stressed.”

Sighing, Magnus rolled the window back up, and then leant his temple against the cool glass. He could see a cottage from here, just the slate roof and a bit of white brick wall over the top of the ten-foot wooden fence that went all of the way around, encircling the house.

“Park up here,” Simon murmured, flicking one finger in the direction of a patch of dead grass, outside of the gate. Magnus pictured a tractor sat in their place, large and bulky and painted bright orange. 

Alec cut the engine and the Toyota whined a little, dying down. Somewhere in the distance, a bird chirped, warming up for its morning songs. 

“This doesn’t look anything like the B&B’s I’ve seen on TV,” Jace announced. “It looks abandoned. Are you sure we’re at the right place?”

“That’s what it says,” Simon said, obviously displeased at having his capability questioned, but he looked unsure. Magnus peered out of the window and had to agree with Jace. There were tiles missing from the roof, and thick moss grew in the spaces left behind. The fence was battered and tired, bits of wood bending over at the top. A few planks were missing completely. A belt of withered grass and dandelions encompassed the fence. There was a distinctly beaten-down air around the place. 

“We don’t have to stay here,” Alec said. “I’m sure there’s somewhere else we can go, maybe another hotel. We can take a different route. I might be able to shake anyone in the back lanes, if they decide to follow us.” 

Magnus was tempted to accept it, even though the question was probably aimed at Simon and Jace. Alec was giving them an out and he desperately wanted to take it. Something really was not right about all of this. 

But one look at Alec, at the drop to his shoulders, made Magnus speak out despite the others’ silence.

“We’re already here,” Magnus said. “We might as well have a look.”

“Where the fuck is here?” Jace said, as they clambered out of the car. He wrinkled his nose. “God, it smells like country. And by country, I mean, shit.” 

“What do you expect it to smell like?” Simon said. He slammed the car door shut fiercely with a loud snap that made Alec wince and pat the car gently. “It’s a farm, moron.”

“No, it isn’t, actually,” Magnus muttered, low enough that nobody could hear him. He put his hands in his oversized pockets as he headed for the gate, ahead of the others. “Not anymore.”

That was the only reason he could conceive for the farm being in such a state of disrepair. It had to have gone out of business, out of purpose, at least as a farm. A quick glance at the surrounding fields showed that there were no animals, and no crops, either. What was a farm without produce? 

The other three followed him as he made his way across the grass. The large fence was unusual, the wood splintered in places, weather-worn. The sheer size was what made it strange, though, as did the large, battered padlock holding it shut. It looked rusted enough that it might break under pressure, and before Magnus could voice this, Jace peered over his shoulder and then gently nudged him aside. Jace jammed his shoulder into it without waiting for approval, and the gate swung open. 

The cottage was a lot larger up close, with many windows, all of them darkened and framed with flowery curtains. He thought he saw something move in the window in the middle of the house, but a second glance showed a set of still blinds. There was no door, which struck him as odd, until he realised that this must be the back of the cottage. 

Magnus didn’t realise that he was taking the lead until he found himself in the middle of the lawn, with the others just behind him. He edged across the grass, conscious of Alec at his shoulder, muttering under his breath. He knew he was probably being overly careful, but something warned him against moving too quickly, or making too much noise. As much as his mind insisted that this was a safe place, that at the very most it was just abandoned, his gut twisted with every step. 

If the way they had come through was plain, with sparse decoration, then the back garden was an explosion of nature. Wildflowers were everywhere, springing up beneath the fence, billowing in the knee-high grass that made up the lawn. In the corner, along the length of the fence, were three bee hives. They were big white hives, with faint patterns painted onto the side in light purple. A sleepy hum emitted from within the hives. 

“Fantastic,” Simon muttered darkly. “I don’t like bees.”

Jace smothered a laugh. 

“I feel like there’s a story behind that,” Magnus whispered back. 

“Oh, there is,” Jace said, half-choking with laughter. 

“Now is not the time for stories,” Simon said hastily.

“These bees will be pretty sluggish now,’ Magnus said, trying to sound reassuring, even though he didn’t know how he knew that.

“As long as they stay in their little houses, I don’t care,” Simon said. 

Magnus climbed the steps to the back door. He stared uneasily at the glass frame that made up half of the door. It was barred with thick, metal cylinders, as if to keep something in. It almost looked comedic, like something out of a cartoon, but in the stillness and the silence, it simply seemed eerie. 

“Seriously, what the hell kind of place is this?” said Jace, creeping closer to Magnus. They were crowded on the porch now, the wooden boards creaking beneath their combined weight. Magnus bit his lip and finally felt a flicker of fear, where before there had only been uneasiness. He took a step to the side and back, until he was stood behind Jace. It must have looked cowardly, but nobody said anything, and he was too busy fighting with his own mind to care if they did. 

Image upon image fluttered before him. The creak as a rocking chair moved back and forth, toes just barely brushing the floor with each movement. He could recall the scent of lavender and the flush of sunshine, the back door open wide to let people bumble in and out, a laughing voice. 

Jace shifted his weight around, and just as Alec sighed and took a step forward, Jace yanked a hand out of his pocket and knocked sharply on the wood. They waited in tense silence. 

Jace raised his hand to knock again, impatiently this time, but the door creaked open the moment his knuckles grazed the glass. 

“Oh dear,” said a thin, sad voice. “Oh dear, oh dear.”

Magnus jumped backwards in shock. At first, he could see nothing. Then, as he peered closer, he spotted the whites of someone’s eyes in the sliver between the door and its frame. Jace swore. Simon made a low sound of agreement. Alec’s hand found Magnus’ elbow and gripped it gently, a warm weight to anchor him. 

“Oh dear,” said the voice again, sounding upset. “You are supposed to be dead.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you! Honestly, if you're still reading this fic, I'm really very grateful. Thank you so much, and please leave a comment and let me know what you thought, or what you hope to see, and come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks!


	7. The Boy in the Cottage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Magnus, breathe, c’mon – don’t, no. Magnus.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the cliff-hanger on the last chapter, have lots of bonding and some creepiness as a consolation prize. Thank you so much for all the lovely comments, they are honestly the only reason why I keep writing this story. Warnings for a panic attack in the last part of the chapter - from "Not a single part of this was real, and Magnus was only just figuring it out." It's not very descriptive though. Thank you!

It was dark inside the cottage. It smelled of must and damp, and something a little burnt, like over-cooked cookies. Magnus could make out odd shapes in the darkness, bits of blocky furniture that were undoubtedly the table and the cooker and the sink; ordinary things made unnerving in the blackness.

Whoever had been at the door scuttled backwards, out of sight. They waited in the dark, as Alec crept forward. He was the only one brave enough to do so, although Jace charged forward at the last moment, maybe to save face. 

“This is your home?” Alec asked, his voice echoing slightly. There was an odd undertone to his voice, something that Magnus didn’t recognise. He wondered if it was pity.

“No,” said the voice. 

“Someone make her stop with the horror movie routine,” Simon said. “It’s creeping me out, and I’ve had enough of being creeped out for one night.”

“I hate to agree with him, ever,” Jace muttered, “but maybe we should just leave.” 

_You are supposed to be dead_. That was what the voice had said, pouring the words through the crack in the door. The words woke something inside of him, but Magnus pushed it away. He had other things to think about. Namely, how the others knew the speaker was a she. 

“What makes you say it’s a woman?” Magnus asked, frowning into the shadows of the room. Simon snorted, moving impossibly closer. Magnus could feel his breath on the back of his neck. 

“The fact that her voice is higher than the sky and she sounds like a little old woman?” Simon drawled, his voice dripping with sarcasm. 

But that wasn’t right, Magnus thought. Because the voice had sounded nothing like anything he had ever heard before. It had been ageless, a sound taken from the very depths of the universe, wrapped in something soft and sharp and angry and righteous. It had been rough and hoarse and coarse. Bleeding with power. 

And it had been sad, distressed. It had been all of those things and more. It had not been human. 

“Oh dear,” said the voice again. And then a woman peeled herself away from a wall, hobbling into the centre of the room. The whites of her eyes were so bright that they were almost fluorescent, like headlamps. Magnus shuddered; she moved like a spider, scuttling with purposeful, airily light footsteps. She wore a shapeless sheath of flowery fabric and she was hunched over in the way that elderly women often were. 

She was hatefully familiar. She didn’t have a name. 

“Aunt,” Magnus whispered. Nobody heard him. 

Magnus did not know her, but he felt as if he had known her once. Her face brought back memories of feelings, but nothing concrete. It was like looking into a rippling pond and recognising the outlines of the reflections, but not where the pond was, or what the pictures were, or why he was looking in the pond in the first place. 

“We came to see about a room for the night,” Alec said carefully. “But I can see that you’re… busy. We can find somewhere else. Sorry to have bothered you, ma’am.”

The woman did not say anything. Her gaze slid leisurely from one boy to another, until she had looked her fill of all of them. Her tongue flicked out to lick at the corners of her lips, snakelike, and then it hung there. Her eyes, which had been sharp, became vacant. Magnus watched her narrowly, unsure of what was happening. 

“Damn,” Jace said softly, concerned. “Is she having a stroke or something?”

As quickly as it had begun, it stopped. The woman spread her arms out to the sides, and said, in a crackling voice, “There are beds upstairs. Come in from the garden, and close the door behind you, and lock it, so that the monsters don’t get in.”

Alec tensed, and for a moment, the woman looked straight at him. Then she scampered backwards, an eerie smile on her face, and disappeared into a black corridor. 

There was a long minute of strained silence, and then Simon actually laughed, a tiny, nervous noise. He had to put his hands over his mouth to quell the noise, and Magnus felt his mouth twitch in response, despite the odd, seriousness of the situation. Simon had an infectious laugh, and it made Magnus want to laugh, too. He wondered what his laugh sounded like; he hadn’t laughed in a long time. 

“Well that was vaguely terrifying,” Alec announced, his voice loud after the sudden quiet. “Do you think we should stay?”

“Any other day and I’d say we need to get the hell out of here,” Jace said. “But she mentioned a bed, and I’m sick of that damn car. Plus, even this has to be better than the hotel. If the worst comes to the worst, it’s four against one. I think we can tackle one tiny little woman, even if she is insane.” 

Simon muttered something about tactless morons and none-too-gently pushed Magnus fully into the cottage, so that he could shut the door. It locked with a rather final-sounding click.

*

A song awoke Magnus. It was a sweet, mournful sound, a stream of words that coalesced to craft a picture of heavy sadness. It filled Magnus’s chest with an immeasurable ache. He sat up, rubbing his eyes with the sleeve of his jumper. It was cold in the cottage, cold enough that he would had been forced to sleep in all of his clothes even if he did have others to change into. His shoes lay in the corner, looking oddly abandoned. 

Magnus grimaced at the peeling wallpaper and the damp curtains. What it must be like, to wake up here on holiday. That was what Bed and Breakfasts were for, according to the website page that Simon had shoved under Magnus’s nose yesterday, when he had asked, in the car. This did not look like a place that someone willingly went to in order to relax and take a break from their busy lives. It looked like a grandmother’s house, one that had fallen into a state of disrepair, one that was haunted. 

He tried to think of his old room, the one he had grown up in. He must have had one, after all. A wave of sadness washed over him as he closed his eyes, almost, but not quite remembering. What might it have been like, a young boy’s room? 

He pictured animal stickers on the skirting boards, blobs of slime stuck to the ceiling from an incident involving his home-made pea-shooter. He thought of science kits left open and cluttering up his desk, along with an assortment of cars and little puzzles. Blue carpet. A bin overflowing with scribbles and doodles.

Maybe he had liked sports. Maybe he adored art. Maybe he had been obsessed with cars, or animals, or aliens and monsters. Maybe his walls had been green, maybe they had been pink. Maybe he had shared it with someone. A brother, perhaps, or a sister. Maybe a cat slept at the end of his bed, a beloved family pet. 

He opened his eyes and glanced around. There was nothing here that he was attached too, nothing that settled the yearning for home that had begun to exist in him. There was nothing familiar. 

He felt a melancholy begin to steal over him, amplified by the song that was still trilling through the walls, and he knew he had to shake it off if he wanted to keep himself together. Magnus let the dream slip from his mind as he slipped out of bed. 

Cautiously, he poked about in the chest of drawers. There were a few pairs of socks, and one glass marble that rolled back and forth as he opened and shut the drawer. He figured that abandoned, dusty socks were better than dirty, sweaty ones, and so he stole a pair and then left the cold, impersonal room behind. 

From the outside, it had been easy to see how big the cottage was. On the inside, it was a labyrinth of narrow, carpeted corridors. He passed a small office, which was bare apart from an empty photo frame and a large, dust-covered desk. Then came the next bedroom, the one that Jace had taken, but when Magnus peered inside, it was empty. A small plaque adorned the cream-coloured door, but whatever had been inscribed on the plaque was long-since rubbed off. 

He knocked quietly on the next door he came to. Within a few seconds, it opened slowly. Simon was there, one hand dragging itself through his blonde hair, which was sticking up in spikes. He looked decidedly rumpled, and he blinked a few times at Magnus before apparently realising who Magnus was. Simon glanced away, then back at him, and then away again. 

“Morning,” Magnus said. He brought one hand up in an awkward half-wave, fingers caught in the hem of his sleeve.

“It is,” Simon agreed. “Alec’s awake, but Jace is still snoring. What’s that noise?”

Simon opened the door wider to let Magnus pass by. Magnus squeezed by, staying as close to the wall as he could get. He needn’t have bothered to make such an effort, he thought, as Simon took five paces back to get away from him. Magnus winced. He wondered if the dirt had come back overnight, or if the shower had not fully gotten rid of the smell. Maybe he was still nothing more than an almost-dead boy. 

“Sorry,” he muttered, and didn’t see the way that Simon flinched. 

Alec was indeed awake, and Jace was indeed snoring. Alec was propped up on Simon’s bed, his sleeping bag abandoned on the floor. He waved at Magnus as Magnus attempted to navigate his way around Jace’s legs, which were sprawled every which way. Simon rolled his eyes and kicked one of Jace’s feet aside. 

Jace snorted and shot straight up. He glared around hazily, as if he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be angry with and then flopped back down against the sleeping bag. He was snoring again within seconds. Magnus almost laughed. 

“I’ve never met anyone else who can sleep like that,” Simon said. He had a disgusted look on his face, but Magnus had a feeling that it wasn’t quite as derogatory as it looked. 

“We did have a rough night,” Alec said. Magnus got the sense that he was always the first to defend Jace, although he did it without rancour, and that he was also the first to kick Jace in the teeth if he was being an asshole. “Did you know, when we were little, he fell asleep on top of an ant’s nest?”

Simon looked delighted at this piece of news. 

Magnus winced. “That can’t have been comfortable.” 

Alec tilted his head. “He didn’t even wake up when they started biting. It was a red ant’s nest, and I had to roll him off them. He’s hopeless. Last year, he fell asleep on the subway. He only needed to go one stop, but he ended up on the other side of the city, with some toothless old man leering down at him.”

Simon was laughing now, positively gleeful. Magnus didn’t know what a subway was, but he couldn’t help the smile that flickered across his face. Alec looked happy for the first time since Magnus had met him, which, God, had only been about one day ago. It seemed like years, in some ways, and in other ways, only seconds. 

“How long have you all known each other?” Magnus asked. He knew Alec and Jace were related, but he didn’t know where Simon fit into all of this. 

“Oh,” Alec said, “Jace told you we were brothers? Well, he was adopted into our family when we were younger and we’ve lived in New York all our lives. We moved to Brooklyn a few years ago.”

“That’s where they met me,” Simon put in, leaning back against the closed door. “I moved schools after my best friend left for art school. Didn’t really know anyone, until Jace aimed a football at my head during break. He broke my glasses.”

“That’s an odd way to make friends,” Magnus observed, although he supposed it was not as odd as not remembering if you had friends. Or, indeed, pulling a boy out of a shallow grave. 

“What about you? Any friends?” Simon asked. Magnus gave him a quizzical look, and Simon’s face fell. 

“Oh, yeah. Sorry,” Simon said, wincing. “I forgot, for a moment.”

“It’s the daylight,” Alec said, nodding towards the window. “It makes everything feel less real. Yesterday seems like it might not have happened at all.”

Daylight. Slowly, so as not to seem insane, Magnus crossed the room to the window. He pulled back the curtain and breathed in sharply as sunlight bathed his face. The sun was warm and bright, a hot circle of scorching colour. It was everything that the dark, damp earth wasn’t. He ached to open the window, to rush downstairs and throw himself into the mid-day warmth, but he could feel Alec’s eyes on the back of his neck, Simon’s calculating stare. 

On the bed, Jace mumbled something ridiculous in his sleep. Simon snorted, and then his laughter tapered off; the song that had woken them rose higher and higher. Magnus had to shut his eyes against the flood of memories, the memories that weren’t proper memories, but just echoes of feelings. He could remember feelings of love and sadness, a little bit of fear. 

Alec made a small, broken noise, and his hand fisted inside of his pocket. The grin was gone from his face, replaced with tight lines of grief. It was, without a doubt, a song for mourning. 

No one, not even Magnus, would guess that it had once been Magnus’s favourite lullaby, one of the only things that would calm him at four in the morning when he woke with bad dreams or a fever. The song was more than a song; it was fingers carding through his hair and warm breath on his cheek, soft blankets and the scent of lavender perfume. And the saddest part was that he would never recall those things, and yet the feeling was there, like a punch in the gut that left him breathless. 

There was something about Alec’s face that gave Magnus pause. He looked as if he were about to break, to crack into a thousand pieces. The fact that he couldn’t hide it said more than if he had. 

“What the hell is that noise?” Jace demanded, his voice muffled by the pillow he had taken from the bed. It hit Magnus then, that all three of them had slept in the same room. There was safety in numbers, so it made sense, but he couldn’t help but feel terribly alone. 

“Music,” Simon said. “Obviously. Somebody’s singing, and this house is weird, so it’s echoing. Get up, you lazy ass.” 

Jace grunted and rolled over, bringing the pillow with him and launching it at Simon. 

“We could look for breakfast,” Magnus said, in an attempt to redirect the conversation. It didn’t work; Simon flung the pillow back, and then blankets began to soar across the room, and Alec sighed. He stood and stretched, and then ducked under an airborne cushion, clapping his hand on Magnus’s shoulder, much to his surprise.

“I’m hungry,” Alec admitted. “It might be good to eat something that isn’t fast food or a stale oat bar. We haven’t exactly been the healthiest, these past few weeks.”

“No one can say we haven’t had a good excuse,” Simon pointed out, and then he yelped as Jace gave up on throwing things and simply grabbed one of Simon’s legs, yanking him onto the floor. Alec shrugged. 

Magnus looked at them. He wondered who the other body had been. He wondered how long they had been on the road for, and who they were running from. He wondered who Alec was grieving for. It didn’t seem appropriate to ask, not when they had taken him in. All Alec had asked for was for him to keep his questions to himself, and Magnus may not have known much about himself, but he decided then and there that he wasn’t the type of person to break promises. 

“Breakfast it is, then,” Magnus said quietly. Alec clapped his hands together, making Jace jump, just as the song came to an odd, choked stop, and a scream took its place. 

It took seconds for them to race out of the room and down the stairs, heading for the source of the sound. Magnus skidded to a stop in the doorway to the kitchen and sucked in a breath. 

The kitchen had flooded. Water soaked into Magnus’s borrowed socks, seeping up the hem of his jeans as he waded through the mess. After a shocked moment, Magnus realised that the water was painfully hot. He jumped, gasping, but moved determinedly towards the kitchen counter, which was suffused in daylight.

The old woman was at the counter, her hands buried deep in the sink. One of the taps was on full-blast, gushing hot water into the sink, which was already overflowing. Water cascaded over the counter and flowed to the floor with a light crash, spreading into a great, sudsy pool that soaked the tiles. The woman’s eyes were blank, fixed on something that Magnus couldn’t see, out in the garden, and her mouth gaped open as she screamed and screamed. It was a hollow, inhuman sound, and it seemed impossible that it came from the mouth of this woman. 

Magnus frantically turned the taps off with shaking hands. His feet burned and his mind recoiled from the noise that echoed endlessly around the cottage. He plunged his hands into the sink and pulled at her arms, yanking them out and dragging her away from the counter. She staggered backwards and collapsed into one of the dining room chairs. Her screams tapered off raggedly, trailing off into a choked-off hum.

Magnus dragged a hand through his hair. Simon and Alec were in the doorway, and he could see Jace’s outline past them, lingering near the stairs. The water was still finding its way into the nooks and crannies of the room, seeping underneath the surfaces and slicking the tiles. Magnus grimaced. It would take a while to restore order, and he had no idea where anything was. In the light of day, he could recognise the mess and clutter of things and bits of useless furniture that had begun to pile up.

Alec advanced on the woman, wincing as the water scalded his skin. Magnus watched as he carefully pulled her wrists up towards him, checking for burns, and Magnus took a moment to stare at the woman, who looked much different in the light of day. 

She was small. Her wrists were thin and speckled with freckles. Her bones jutted out all over the place, wrapped in papery skin. Magnus glanced up into white eyes and looked away, unable to hold her unblinking gaze. He wondered if that was what Simon felt when he looked at Magnus. Her hair hung limply about her shoulders in ragged snarls. It was grey, the colour of the sky in winter, of cigarette smoke and ghosts. 

Her wrists were thin, but they were not burned. Despite the pain that flared in Magnus’s own hands from his brief collision with the hot water, the woman’s hands remained unharmed. They weren’t even red. 

“Is she alright?” Simon asked, stepping warily into the kitchen. Jace remained where he was, brow furrowed as he regarded the scene. “She sounded like she was in pain.” 

Alec frowned, obviously unsure. “She doesn’t seem to be hurt. Her hands are fine, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they started to hurt a bit later on. I can’t see any marks or anything though.” 

“Burns hurt worse than they are.” Simon’s voice was very matter-of-fact, but Magnus could hear the slight shake that underlined it. The woman had unnerved him. She had unnerved all of them.

Another memory flickered to life in the back of Magnus’s mind. Magnus blinked, hard. It wasn’t a memory he wanted to see, but it wasn’t going anywhere soon. 

“Mops,” Magnus said roughly. He cleared his throat and shook his head, and then forced his attention back to the woman. 

“Where are the mops?” he asked gently. She was looking at the window with vacant eyes. Magnus sighed and knelt in front of her. Water clung to the denim of his jeans, soaking his knees. The woman’s eyes stayed fixed on a point that he could not see, even as he gently took her head between his hands and turned it towards him. This close, he could see the lines etched into her skin, wrinkling the corners of her mouth and her eyes. 

“Ma’am? We need to clean up before somebody slips.” 

The woman opened her mouth, her shrivelled lips pursing unpleasantly as she made a small popping sound. She looked as if she had just tasted something sour.

“Slips,” she repeated quietly. “She already slips, between this world and another.” 

Magnus shared a look with Alec. 

“I don’t know what that means,” Alec said carefully, “but we really need a mop or something, do you know where they are?” 

The woman’s eyes finally found Magnus’s. Her gaze was intrusive. It almost felt as if she were looking through him, down into the deep, dark parts where everything lay hidden. He took a steadying breath and looked away, unable to keep eye contact. She leaned forward until her lips were at his ear, and Magnus shuddered.

“You know what it means, little dead one,” she whispered, not loud enough for the others to hear. “You’ve slipped too.” Then she giggled, a high-pitched sound that forced something inside of him to snap. 

Magnus tore his hands away from her and stood up, shaking. He didn’t feel like a violent person, but something about her voice and vagueness made Magnus want to clutch her shoulders and shake her until an answer trickled forth. She seemed like she had answers, answers that Magnus desperately wanted, and he couldn’t figure out how to get them.

“I need some air,” Magnus announced. Before anyone could stop him, he had crossed to the back door and flung it open, a flurry of water accompanying him as he stepped out into the garden and stormed around, searching for something to keep his mind occupied.

The garage door was stiff and rusted shut. Magnus yanked on the worn leather strap until the door burst upwards with a grating noise, showering flakes of silver paint all over the grass. Magnus blinked into the dark recesses of the garage, and took a hesitant step forward. 

It was dusty. Most of the room was taken up by a small orange tractor that slumbered in the far corner. The wheels were huge and still caked in dry mud from its last run of the field, but it had obviously not left the garage in a long time. A metal bench ran along the length of the opposite wall. It was cluttered with flower pots and open paint cans, tools, strips of paper and a few broken garden ornaments. A chipped gnome dangled a tangled fishing line over the edge of the bench. 

The space in between the tractor and the bench was filled with cardboard boxes. Some were pretty battered, and others were labelled with black scribbles that Magnus couldn’t make out. Inching forwards, he looked around the room. He doubted he was going to find a mop in here, but he wanted to be away from that woman for a while. He didn’t want to have to go back, not yet. 

He ran a hand along the nearest box, skimming its contents. Someone had scrawled Claudia along the side of the box in black marker. The handwriting was messy; he wondered who Claudia was. Perhaps a friend of the woman’s, or a relative. Shrugging, he pulled out the first thing that his fingers met and held it up to the light. It was soft and orange, an oddly misshapen jumper that looked as if someone had knitted it themselves, badly. He wasn’t sure if it was for a man or a woman, but he guessed that it belonged to Claudia, whomever she might have been. 

“I don’t think orange is really your colour.” 

Spooked by the sudden voice, Magnus jumped. The jumper landed on his foot and he scooped it up, glaring half-heartedly at Simon. The taller boy was standing in a patch of sunlight, one hand in his pocket and the other trailing along the garage wall as he moved to join Magnus. 

“Jace said you don’t have much fashion sense,” Magnus said quietly, smiling hesitantly. “I’m not sure I trust your judgement.” 

He was relieved when Simon grinned. He wasn’t entirely sure whether teasing would be accepted in the group. After all, they weren’t friends, not really. As soon as he thought it, his smile drooped. Simon watched him with badly hidden concern. It struck him then that Simon was, of all things, probably a kind person. He was just in a bad situation. 

“Something wrong? Besides the obvious, of course,” Simon added. 

“A lot’s wrong,” Magnus mumbled. He crushed the jumper beneath his fingers. “I have no memories. Someone buried me without checking if I was dead. I’m travelling with possible murderers and we just ran away from another murder.”

Simon’s face had tightened at the word ‘murderers’, but there was no shame in his expression, no guilt. It sparked a realisation in Magnus; either they hadn’t killed anyone or they had killed someone and they just didn’t care. But regardless of which it was, there had been a body, of that much Magnus was sure. 

“I’ll admit,” Simon said slowly, “that all of those are pretty awful things, but despite how much they suck, they’re all very obvious. There’s something else wrong with you. What is it?”

Magnus looked up, surprised. 

“Don’t look so shocked,” Simon said dryly. “I am the smart one in the group, after all.”

He hugged the jumper closer to his chest, tucking it under his chin. Simon was watching him intently, glasses flashing as he surveyed Magnus’s face. Magnus was surprised when neither of them looked away; just that morning Simon had sprung away from him like Magnus had some kind of disease, and now he was staring at him, right in the eye. 

“I feel,” Magnus said, and then he stopped. His mouth worked, but the words escaped him. Simon watched him carefully, patiently staying silent until Magnus threw his hands up and gave in. 

“You said it felt familiar,” Simon said. “And you told Jace that you thought you might love it here. The woman, when she opened the door, she said something about one of us not being dead when we should be. You called her Aunt. Do you think you’ve been here before? Do you think you might know this place, or that woman?”

“I don’t know,” Magnus said quietly. “Wouldn’t that be odd? If we came to a place I knew, even though I can’t remember knowing it, right after you happened to find me?”

Simon’s face flickered for a moment. “You know, in Jewish Religion, there’s some debate as to whether our destiny is determined, or if we make our own path. I think there's a plan for all of us.”

“You do?” 

“I do,” Simon said. “It’s what keeps me sane in this world, with these friends. Maybe this is just a part of your path.”

Magnus didn’t have a response for that. He tightened his hold on the jumper, held it close to his chest as he tried to puzzle through the mess of feelings inside of him. Emotions, without their attachments, were flighty, tricky things. Magnus couldn’t pin them down.

“They aren’t memories,” Magnus said. “I don’t remember specific things like dates or names or faces. I can’t picture events or remember anything that’s happened to me. I don’t actually remember anything. I just get feelings, sometimes, flashes of things that might be my past. Scents and noises. Just little, unhelpful things that end up confusing me more than anything.” 

“It’s difficult,” Simon said, sighing. “I don’t exactly have medical experience, but I think you should be remembering things by now. You have to give it time, though.” 

He had stepped closer when Magnus’s attention had been swayed, and now he stood close enough that Magnus could reach out and touch, if he wanted to. He was surprised to find that he did want to. He wanted to feel the life pulsing through Simon, wanted to know that this wasn’t just Magnus trapped in his own head, deep under the ground, waiting for somebody to dig him out. He felt a flare of panic at the notion and sucked in a breath. 

What’s if that’s all this was? What if that was why nothing made sense, why there were murderers and blood and strange boys that hadn’t left him behind? That’s what this was, just Magnus’s imagination running wild, desperately concocting a story to combat the loneliness, the death and the sleep and the cold confines of his grave. 

Not a single part of this was real, and Magnus was only just figuring it out. 

“Magnus, breathe, c’mon – don’t, no. Magnus.”

Simon’s face swam into view, and Magnus realised that he couldn’t breathe. The room had become strangely airless and a thousand times smaller – he was crushed in a small space, thick with the scent of damp and colder for it. The back of his head ached and his breaths came in quick, short gasps that he couldn’t control. 

Hands gripped his face, and Magnus sucked in another breath. He let the panic roll over him, wave after wave of fear and uncertainty that left him trembling in its wake. It felt like years before he could breathe again, years where the only thing he could feel besides the panic were the hands on his skin. 

“What was that?” Magnus’s voice cracked. He blinked until the grey spots in his vision fled, and he felt the knot in his chest loosen as he stared at Simon, who watched him warily. He stared at the boy who had crammed himself under the workbench with him. 

“A panic attack, I think,” Simon said. He took his hands away, let them hover awkwardly before he folded them in his lap. “It’s probably a belated reaction to everything you’ve been through. I expect you were in shock, and now you’re starting to deal with what’s happened. You dropped this, when you tried to get away.” 

Magnus took the orange jumper from Simon’s hands. He guessed he had hit his head when he backed up, overwhelmed by panic, because there was a lump forming at the base of his skull, and his entire brain hurt. 

“We should probably get out of here,” Simon said. He crawled backwards until he was standing in the garage again, and Magnus followed him, brushing off his jeans. His hands came away smeared in dust. 

“Thank you,” Magnus said. “For not leaving. For staying. And for helping.”

It was suddenly hard to speak again. 

“Don’t mention it,” Simon said, shrugging it off with a smile. 

Magnus folded up the jumper and tucked it under his arm before striding out of the garage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Please leave a comment and let me know what you thought, I love hearing from you. And come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr. Thank you!


	8. The Boy in the Kitchen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s odd,” Alec agreed. “But I think we’ve got bigger problems at the moment.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! New chapter, a bit shorter than some of the others but things pick up again in the next one :) We are getting closer to some answers! Thank you so much for the lovely response to the last chapter, I'm really happy with all the comments, I love reading your thoughts. Thank you, enjoy!

“You missed a spot.”

Alec kicked water at Jace, who calmly avoided the spray. He was perched on the stairs, holding a burnt cookie and wondering whether he really hated his body enough to eat it. A black crumb tumbled off the cookie, and Jace’s stomach rumbled. He gave in, taking a bite, and grimaced as he swallowed a mouthful of charcoal. 

“This would go a lot more quickly if you would actually help me.” Alec swiped the mop across the floor and then wrung the excess water out in an old, dusty bucket they had found in the cupboard. 

“I signed up for a road-trip, not wading through a hundred years’ worth of wet filth,” Jace said. He chewed on the cookie and stared at the back door. “What do you think they’re doing?” 

“Looking for mops,” Alec said. “You could always go and tell them that we found some.” 

“That would involve wading, wouldn’t it?” 

Alec sighed, and leaned against his mop. A thoughtful look crossed his face, and Jace regarded him warily. 

“I don’t like that look,” Jace said. “That look usually leads to the Emergency Room. Or to detention.” 

Or dying, he thought, but he didn’t say that. He would never say it. The memory was clear enough for them both without a verbal reminder. 

“Magnus,” Alec said slowly. “What do you think of him?” 

Jace shrugged. “He seems like an alright guy. I can’t tell if he’s the luckiest bastard alive or just a plain old unlucky bastard. I mean, we found him, and he lived, but the guy was buried alive.”

“I wonder who tried to kill him,” Alec murmured. “He must have done something pretty awful to deserve that.” 

“That’s victim blaming,” Simon said, pushing open the back door. “You found the mops.” 

Magnus peered over Simon’s shoulder, standing up on tip-toes to see what they were doing. Alec caught up another mop from where it was leaning against the worktop and lobbed it to Simon, who fumbled the catch. Magnus picked it up absent-mindedly and handed it to Simon with a distracted smile. 

“Hey, Zombie. Over here. What have you got?” 

“A jumper,” Magnus said, gesturing with the orange lump. “I found it. What happened to the lady?” 

“I shoved the old woman in there,” Jace said, jerking his head at the open doorway that lead into a large sitting room. He raised his voice and added, pointedly, “Because I’m an extremely helpful person and an excellent friend.”

Alec waved the mop at him threateningly. Magnus smiled at him too, and Alec’s eyes went wide, his cheeks heating up. He stared determinedly at the floor, mopping furiously, while Jace arched an eyebrow. 

“Interesting,” he murmured. 

Magnus didn’t notice anything. He was too busy focusing on the sitting room. The sitting room might have been large, but it was made smaller by the amount of furniture crammed into it. Big, overstuffed armchairs and unnecessary end tables lined the walls. A thick layer of dust covered an array of porcelain ornaments that sat on the large green mantelpiece and the flowery carpet was badly stained, as were the closed curtains. 

The woman sat motionless in one of the chairs. She was so small that it took Magnus a moment to find her, and Jace took a perverse joy in watching him jump when he did, his soft face hardening with surprise. 

Jace hung back while Magnus moved closer to the woman, taking her tiny, papery hands in his equally small ones and squeezing them gently. He spoke so quietly that Jace didn’t hear a word of it, but something happened between them. The woman looked up sharply, and for the first time, there was something human in her gaze. 

Magnus drew back and the madness took her again. Her head rolled and she sniggered silently. 

A tap on Jace’s shoulder made him jerk around, swearing quietly under his breath. Alec held up his hands in mock-surrender, one eyebrow arching in curious amusement. 

“That’s the most focused you’ve been in all the years I’ve known you,” Alec teased. “C’mon, Simon’s cooking something for all of us. We need to talk about what we’re going to do.” 

“Will she be alright?”

Jace jumped again as Magnus came up behind him. 

“Both of you stop doing that,” Jace commanded them. “I’m surprisingly fragile underneath my incredibly masculine exterior. The witch will be fine, she’s fallen asleep.” 

They all glanced at the woman. Her head lolled back against the cushion. 

“Either that or she’s dead,” Jace said, frowning.

Magnus’s eyes widened in horror, and Jace felt a tiny bit guilty for the way he whipped around, hands flying to his throat as though he couldn’t breathe. 

“He’s just joking,” Alec said firmly, his hand hovering over Magnus’ shoulder, but not quite touching. “Badly.” 

The floor was still wet. Simon, who was not cooking, stood safely on a green tea-towel, an island in the damp sea. He was pouring over a large book that was balanced on top of one of the worktops, fiddling with the ear of his glasses. He always fiddled with his glasses when he was concentrating.

“What’s that?” Jace asked. 

“A book,” Simon said flatly. They both winced as Alec sighed behind them, and Simon hastily added, “I think it’s a register. This place is supposed to be a B&B after all, and those places don’t usually have a lot of technology, do they?” 

“This place definitely doesn’t,” Jace muttered. “It’s like something out of the dark ages. I miss my music, and daytime TV.” 

Simon pulled a face. “Anyway, they have to keep track of guests somehow. I’ve been looking through this, and it looks like we are the first people to come here in over a year.” He demonstrated this by thumbing through a wad of empty pages, until they came to a block of signatures. Jace peered at the date. 

“Yeah, at least a year ago,” Jace said. “Find out anything else, genius?” 

“The place hasn’t closed down even with the lack of customers,” Simon said. “And I found another book, down here, detailing deliveries. They’re all from this company, and it looks like the kind of place you can order in bulk from, you know? Like food and supplies, to keep the place running.” 

“Why is this important?” Alec said. He peered over Simon’s shoulder at the register, and then at the slightly smaller, leather-bound book. 

“The dates are all new, from this year,” Simon said, tapping the cover. “It’s a bi-monthly arrangement, I think, but there aren’t any signatures. Someone delivers food and parcels to this place every two weeks, like clockwork. They bring them inside and put them away, but nobody signs the ledger. Not Amelia or the delivery person.”

“Amelia?” 

“The books belong to someone called Amelia Harris,” Simon said, flipping to the very first page, where a label had been stuck and was now beginning to peel. “I’m assuming that’s the woman in the other room. If she’s the only one here, then it’s likely she’s in charge, isn’t it?”

“Maybe she ate the actual owner,” Jace suggested.

“The signatures, though,” Simon insisted. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” 

Jace shrugged. “Maybe they don’t need a signature. Could be a contracted thing, couldn’t it?”

“There are signatures from the previous year, though. And if it was a contract, then why bother with the ledger at all? And if they’re coming in here regularly, then surely they’ve seen the state of this place. Why would you keep bringing supplies to a place that’s fallen completely into disrepair? And whoever does the deliveries must have something to do with the woman, so they must know that she’s a bit, uh…” 

“Completely insane?” Jace offered. 

Simon sighed. “I was going to say indisposed.” He turned to Alec eagerly. “What do you think? It’s odd, isn’t it?” 

“It’s odd,” Alec agreed. “But I think we’ve got bigger problems at the moment.”

Simon looked rather hurt at the dismissal, but it faded into something plain and impassive as Alec clapped him on the shoulder. Jace wanted to say something, offer some kind of awkward comfort, but he was distracted by a sudden sizzling sound. A delicious scent wafted through the kitchen, and Jace wheeled around, his mouth watering. 

“Is that bacon?” Jace demanded, his stomach growling. 

A pan was sitting on the cooker, filled to the brim with strips of bacon. Magnus was standing next to it, holding an egg away from him and regarding it as though it were a bomb. He was covered in flour, as were the worktops, and the floor by his feet looked as though a sugar factory had exploded. A packet of flour had tipped over in the cupboard and emptied itself over everything as soon as Magnus opened the door. He looked up as all of them stared at him, and Jace had to bite his lip to keep from laughing. 

“I may need a little help,” Magnus said. 

*

The boot of the car was crammed full of everything they could scavenge from the Bed & Breakfast. They had scoured all of the rooms for things that the woman – the others had taken to calling her Amelia, but some small piece of a memory insisted that she was called Aunt – wouldn’t need, and piled them into their bags before shoving them into the car. Magnus had found more socks in one of the other bedrooms and furtively put them on over the socks he already wore – his hands and feet seemed to stay cold no matter what he did. He felt bad for stealing until Simon revealed that he had left a sizeable wad of money under the egg basket in the kitchen. 

“It’s a shame we can’t take more food,” Jace said, frowning at the boot, which refused to close properly. “I know we’re not going to run out of money, but it might be nice to eat something that didn’t come in a take-away container.”

“You had breakfast on a plate earlier,” Magnus pointed out. 

Jace snorted. “Never change, Zombie.”

“We’re going to have to take some stuff out,” Alec said. He threw himself at the boot again, trying to shove it closed so that he could lock it, but it simply sprang open again when he stepped back. Alec narrowed his eyes at the car. The car stared back defiantly. 

“Don’t be stupid,” Simon said, pushing his glasses back up his nose. “Just think of it like Tetris. Or a math puzzle.”

“We can’t break the car,” Alec warned him. “It’s a rental, so we need it in semi-good condition for when we eventually return it.”

“Don’t you have a car of your own?” 

“There’s a van back home, in Brooklyn, but we couldn’t exactly bring it on the plane,” Simon said. He had one hand on the boot when the windows in the cottage behind them shattered. 

Magnus found himself on the floor, staring up at the pale sky in confusion, gasping for breath. There was a dark shape hovering above him, and over the ringing in his ears he could hear shouting and yelling, but he couldn’t make out the words. He was thoroughly winded, shocked still, and it wasn’t until a hand collided sharply with his cheek that he found he could breathe again. 

Suddenly, Magnus was drowning in sound. Jace’s face swam into view, blocking the light of the sun, Magnus blinked up at him and then moved to rise, woodenly, but Jace shoved him back down as another window shattered, and then another, and another. Magnus turned his head and saw Simon and Alec crouched down by the car, their hands pressed against their ears, faces contorted in pain. 

Magnus surged up and shoved Jace back and over, rolling until Jace was on his back in the dirt. Magnus’s arms bracketed his head, and he stared at the cottage in blank horror. 

The fence had been blown down, and now a scattered circle of splintered wood ringed the house. The lawn looked burned, scorched. The porch was a wreck of wood and stone, and the whole house seemed to shake in its foundations as the piercing noise ripped through the old farm. Not a single window remained intact. 

There was a woman in there, Magnus remembered. He scrambled to his feet and sprinted towards the house. He could vaguely hear the others shouting at him, but the words were lost to the fierce beat of his pulse as he raced up the porch, dodging the broken bits of glass and crumbling brick that threatened to trip him up. The door fell open and crumpled to the floor like tissue paper. Magnus leapt over it and kept running. 

He didn’t know the house well enough. The corridors snaked and twisted around him like a moving labyrinth that was desperate to see him stumble. He found a music room, filled with coiled husks of dusty instruments that hadn’t been played in centuries, and darted through it to a study that was packed with more cardboard boxes. He found bedrooms and a long, empty room with a mirror at one end that he averted his gaze from instinctively, and the whole time he ran, the house shook apart around him. 

He caught a glimpse of the kitchen from one of the lower bedrooms just as the wallpaper ripped away from the wall he was standing by. Magnus batted it away with a yelp, and then stared as the revealed brickwork began to shift and move. The bricks vibrated as though they were about to explode, and Magnus sucked in a breath and ducked through the doorway just in time. He heard the shrill sound of solid brick snapping apart and sprinted into the sitting room. 

The armchair where the woman had been was empty. The entire room was empty. Magnus stared until the wallpaper began to peel away from the walls there too, and then he backed into the kitchen and ran to the back door. When he yanked on the handle, the door simply rattled in its hinges. He held the large, blocky padlock in his hand; the woman was gone, but the back door was locked tight from the inside, and they would have seen her come through the front door. 

“Perhaps she went upstairs,” Magnus muttered, and then he cried out as something heavy smacked into him from above. He had stayed still for too long and the house had seized its’ chance. 

It must have been one of the bricks, he thought dazedly, blinking at the rubble by his feet. His shoulder hurt; it was a kind of pain that burned, forcing him to his knees. He gulped back tears and forced himself to breathe through the plaster and dust that swirled thickly in the air. 

“Magnus!”

Strong arms wrapped around him from behind and heaved him off the floor. His vision whited out as his shoulder was gripped tightly, and then he found himself being twisted in mid-air and flung over someone else’s shoulder. When the fog lifted, he was staring down at gravel and grass as the person holding him ran through the front garden towards the car, which was parked further down the lane, all the doors flung open. Each step jarred his shoulder further, but he was too dizzy to try and stand on his own. 

Jace stuck his head out of the car as they skidded to a stop, his face pale and angry. He appeared to be shouting himself hoarse. Magnus caught a few increasingly creative swear words as he was pushed into the back seat, and then the door slammed shut and he jolted out of his daze. 

Jace tried to slap him again, presumably to tell if he was awake, and Magnus caught his hands in mid-air and batted them away before groaning, hugging his arm tightly to his body. 

“Stop slapping me.”

“What are you doing?” Jace said. “Are you hurt?” 

The car lurched to life. Alec had barely closed the door before he stepped on the pedal, and as they shot down the road Magnus tried to turn around, to watch the cottage disappear. It felt like he was leaving something behind, like he had forgotten something important. 

Simon whipped around in the passenger seat to glare at Magnus. He was gripping the panic handle tightly, his knuckles white and his lips pursed together. 

“Why did you go back in?” Simon hissed. 

“The woman,” Magnus said weakly. 

“You don’t even know her!” 

Magnus eyed them incredulously. They were all staring at him like he was insane. “I have to know someone to not want them dead?”

They flinched as one. 

“Jace, check his shoulder,” Alec said sharply. “He was on the floor when I found him.” 

“That’s what I was trying to do,” Jace said, rolling his eyes. This time Magnus didn’t bat his hands away when they pulled at the neck of his jumper. He was busy staring at Simon, who had gone red at Magnus’s words and was now glowering at his phone. Magnus could see the phone in the reflection of the window; the screen was blank. 

“Put your seatbelt on,” Alec said, craning his neck around to glare briefly at them both. They were back on the motorway now, joining the stream of other cars making their way to work and school and home. The world had come alive while the house had shaken apart. Magnus still didn’t really know what had happened. 

“I can’t do both,” Jace said. He leaned over Magnus and winced. “That’s nasty. Look, it’s already starting to bruise.” 

Magnus peered down at his shoulder. There were the beginnings of a blue tinge to his dark skin. “It’s not broken, is it?” Magnus asked, and Jace shook his head, his fringe falling into his eyes. 

“No, but if it hit you that hard then you’re lucky you didn’t dislocate it. I might be an unappreciated genius, but I don’t know how to pop a shoulder back in.”

“I do,” Simon said absently. 

“Of course you do.” Alec rolled his eyes. “Seatbelts, now.”

Jace buckled himself in with a very pointed glare in Alec’s direction, and Magnus copied him after a moment of fumbling. His hands were cold and seemed to have forgotten everything he had remembered in the last few days, and his shoulder still ached with each movement. He drummed his fingers against his jeans and tried not to look at any of them. 

“So, what’s the verdict, then?” Jace said. “You’re the self-proclaimed smart-ass of the group, so you tell us why the house fucking exploded. You keep insisting that the things that are following us are human, but I’ve never seen anything human do something like that.”

“Something must have happened inside the house to make it explode like that,” Simon snapped. “I don’t know – a bomb, or uh – I don’t know, alright?” 

“The wallpaper peeled off of the walls,” Magnus said quietly. “Like someone invisible was ripping it away.”

Simon pursed his lips. “It could have been anything. An earthquake or something.” 

“An earthquake that only affected a single house in the middle of nowhere?” Jace said sarcastically. “An earthquake that none of us could feel the effects of, despite one of us actually being inside the house? Don’t earthquakes usually have some effect on, oh, I don’t know, the earth?”

“Well it certainly wasn’t invisible people, was it?” Simon said harshly. 

Magnus blushed angrily, feeling stupid. He sunk down in the seat, tucking his chin under his jumper. Obviously, someone could not have ripped the wallpaper down without him noticing them, but that’s what it had looked like and Magnus thought the information could have been useful. He glanced up at Simon, who was red with anger, and then at Jace, who was grinding his teeth. Clearly not. 

He looked at Alec, then, who glanced at him in the mirror, as if sensing his gaze. Magnus thought his eyes looked vaguely apologetic, and he tried to smile, but it came out more like a grimace. Alec’s face softened. 

“Magnus saw it happen. He was the one inside, so I think he has the authority on the subject. But none of us know what’s going on, and we won’t find out by arguing with each other about it. So, let’s just focus on getting to where we need to go.”

The stony silence persisted until the car reached a line of traffic that seemed to stretch on for miles, and then Alec turned the radio on and the sounds of the news presenter talking filled the car. The news bled into the weather report, and then into an acoustic song that Alec turned his nose up at, flicking through the stations. 

It was as if nothing had happened. As if the cottage they had spent the night in hadn’t suddenly been wrecked and destroyed in front of their eyes, with no visible cause, no earthly explanation. As if every brick hadn’t shot out of the walls like bullets from a gun. As if they had simply woken up this morning, eaten breakfast and then packed the car and left. 

Magnus leaned across the back seat as far as his seatbelt would allow and whispered, “Where are we going?”

Jace stopped grinding his teeth. “I forgot we only just picked you up. Some tiny town in the middle of nowhere, down past Devon. I’ve only been to England once, so I have no idea where we’re actually going.”

“What’s Devon?” 

Jace flapped a hand at the window. “This is Devon. It’s in England.”

Magnus glanced out at the endless fields, a blur of green and brown and yellow, broken up by clumps of ramshackle houses and withering trees. Wave upon wave of damp, mottled colour. 

“It’s a county,” Jace continued. “I went here once on holiday with my father. We rented an ugly little cottage – one that didn’t explode – and spent most of the time getting lost on the moors. It’s not bad, if you like sheep and fields and doing fuck all with your days.” 

“That’s not where we’re going, though,” Alec added. “We should be able to just drive through it and straight into Cornwall, which is the next county over. It shouldn’t take more than an hour or so. We would have been there already if these two hadn’t needed to take a break yesterday.” 

Yesterday. Was it only yesterday? It felt longer. There was something of an accusation in Alec’s tone, something that spoke of the way his foot was pressed down hard on the accelerator. He had somewhere to be and if he had his way, he would have been there and back already. Whatever they were doing, it was urgent, and it didn’t include Magnus. Magnus was just another blip on the windscreen, something that had slowed them down. Just like the body they had buried. Magnus thought of graves and wondered, not for the first time, who was lying in his. 

“My sincere apologies for not having a steel bladder.” Jace slumped back against the seat with a roll of his eyes. “And you’re not made of metal, Alec. You needed to sleep.” 

They fell silent at that. Magnus had more questions but he kept them to himself, too anxious to inquire in case he stumbled upon something painful. He felt a little miserable as he leaned his head against the window, drinking in the pale sunlight and watching the world whirl past. He was even more aware of how little he actually knew these people. They were all strangers to him. 

He wondered what would have happened if they had never stopped for a break. Would he still be under the ground? Would someone else have found him, or would he still be there, right now, trapped in thick silence, unable to think or move or breathe?

Shuddering, Magnus tucked his hands inside his sleeves and stared out of the window until his eyes wouldn’t stay open anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Please leave a comment and let me know what you thought, I love hearing from you. And come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr. Thank you!


	9. The Boy in the Diner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I know you said not to ask questions,” Magnus said hoarsely, when he could breathe again. “But I almost died again, and I’d like to know why.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Another chapter, sorry about the wait, life has been hectic. I hope you enjoy it, no warnings except for a gunshot, but it doesn't hit anyone. And swearing, always swearing. Thank you so much!

_A world of grey smoke where the colours are all wrong. The grass has never been green here, and it never will be. The people pass through like water on a wheel and when they leave they are not people any longer, nor were they people when they arrived._

_Towers upon towers of white stone that begins to crumble under the touch of black fire. Sprigs of white heather and fields of lavender succumb to the water, the waves that rise up and crush the smoke and the flames. The world is crumbling under the nature’s foul breath. But it is a different world, and from the ashes of an old world, there blooms a new one._

_A single flower stands tall in an empty field. The grass is burned and dead but the flower grows, stretching up towards two suns. Leaves unfurl and petals sway and the little people dance beneath it, the little people pray. It is a sign. This world is not yet done._

*

Magnus shot up in his seat. He didn’t know what had woken him, but his head was throbbing with pain, just behind his eyes, as though someone had shone a very bright light in his face whilst he had slept. Groaning, Magnus clutched his head and leaned forward, squeezing his eyes shut. He didn’t remember falling asleep.

“Are you okay?” 

It took Magnus a moment to realise that Alec was speaking to him. The other boy was partially lit by the sun that filtered in through the dark windows, dousing his face in shadow. Magnus met his gaze in the rear-view mirror. He nodded slowly, offering a slightly strained smile. 

“Head hurts,” he murmured, careful to keep quiet. Simon was snoring lightly in the front of the car, head tilted back and mouth wide open, legs propped up on the dashboard. Jace had curled up in a tight little ball. Magnus couldn’t tell if he was alive, let alone if he was awake and listening. 

“Got some tablets in the bag next to Jace’s feet,” Alec said, jerking his head slightly, eyes still on the road. “Just don’t breathe in down there, or you might pass out. He only washes once a year.” 

“Fuck off,” Jace muttered.

“How did you know he was awake?” Magnus asked, frowning warily at Jace, who remained unmoving. 

“There was an absence of ear-splitting snores,” Alec explained, grinning. “Seriously though, painkillers are in the bag. Front pocket, I think, and you can use Simon’s drink.”

It became immediately apparent that pills didn’t agree with Magnus. He choked on the first one and spat the second one out in his hand, spilling water down his front. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and glared briefly at Jace when he began to laugh. 

“These are disgusting,” Magnus said. “I think I’ll just sleep it off.”

“Good luck with that,” Alec said. “We’re almost there.”

There was a strange rattle at Alec’s words. The car gave a great lurch and Alec slammed his feet down on the pedal, jolting to a stop. He quickly sped up again as someone beeped and swerved behind him. 

Simon jerked forward and headbutted his own knees, yelping in pain. Magnus could hear Jace snickering but was more concerned by the black smoke that was pouring out of the bonnet in great plumes, blocking the windscreen. Alec swore and slammed a hand down on the steering wheel before pulling into a lay-by. Then he got out and stormed around the car, wafting the billowing smoke away as he lifted the bonnet and proceeded to swear profusely. The car started to beep sadly.

“Perfect,” Simon muttered, clambering out of the car. 

It had been drizzling slightly, but now the rain began to pick up, turning the pale sky into a canvas of smouldering grey as clouds draped themselves over the sun. Magnus stared out of the window at Alec and Simon, who appeared to be shouting at each other and gesticulating wildly. The rain came down even harder, soaking them to the bone. 

Magnus turned to Jace. “Should we help?”

Jace considered him. “Know anything about cars?”

Magnus lifted an eyebrow. 

Jace snorted, conceding the unspoken point with a shrug of his shoulder. Then he curled back up in his seat and closed his eyes. Magnus rolled down the window and poked his head out, gasping as the rain soaked him immediately. He put his head back in and stuck his hand out instead, marvelling at the drops that clung to his fingers and wet his skin like a thin veneer of silk. 

“Rain,” Magnus said quietly. 

“You’re one weird guy.” Magnus turned his head to see that Jace was watching him curiously. “It’s like you’ve never seen the stuff before. I know it probably feels like that, what with your head being empty, but you have been here, on this planet, for years, you know? It shouldn’t be so new to you.”

“It feels new,” Magnus said. “All of it, it feels so new. Like I’ve never seen it before. Imagine not knowing anything, and the first thing you feel is earth and dirt against your face and in your lungs. Imagine not knowing what lungs are until you can’t use them anymore, and then you dredge the word up and it fits in your mind again, and you know what they are but you still can’t use them. The first thing I knew was that I was being buried alive.” 

It was not the whole truth, but it was a sliver of it, and the sliver was enough to make Jace quiet. Simon snapped his door open and threw himself into the passenger seat before Magnus could apologise for the pale, horrified expression on Jace’s face. He was holding one half of a damp, colourful piece of paper that appeared to have ripped in half and his hair was stuck to his forehead, wet and dripping. 

“Stubborn asshole.” Simon yanked his phone and began to jab at the screen, settling the ripped paper on his lap. “He wants to carry on even though the damn car is pretty obviously screwed. A sign back there said there was a rest-stop somewhere. Let’s just hope it has a garage too.”

“What happened to the map?”

“He started shouting about it to make a point and ripped it in half when I tried to grab it so that it wouldn’t get too wet, because he’s a stubborn asshole.” 

The last was said with special emphasis as Alec climbed back into the car, holding the other half of the map in his clenched fists. Magnus had never thought of Alec as an intimidating person and even in anger, he seemed more desperate than dangerous. Which perhaps made him all the more dangerous. 

“If we’re going, we should go,” Jace said. He kicked the back of Alec’s seat gently. “Let’s see if this stupid car will make it to a garage before it gives in. And if not, you might finally have to let Simon convince you into buying a damn car that’s fast and actually works.” 

As if this was some old joke, something to return to, the atmosphere turned again, like a tide breaking against the shore. Simon snorted softly. Alec’s shoulders loosened and he smiled into the mirror before turning the key in the ignition. Jace leant back, proud. Magnus once again felt like an outsider, an intruder in someone else’s story. 

The car made it to the garage. Alec found them half an hour after they pulled into the rest-station. They had slid into a booth at a small café and ordered food for all three of them, which arrived just as Alec slid into the seat opposite Magnus. Magnus smiled tentatively around a mouthful of food, and then took another bite. 

“You know, you’re allowed to chew, Magnus,” Alec said, grinning. “Your burger isn’t going to sprout legs and run off out the door.” 

Magnus felt his face get hot as he put the burger back down on the plate, nudging a few chips over the edge and onto the table. He was hungry enough that he could eat ten burgers and then the plates as well but, he didn’t want to make a fool out of himself if he could help it. He knew Alec was just teasing him, the way he teased Jace and Simon, as evidenced by the smile on his face, but Magnus also knew that he wasn’t their friend. Jace still called him Zombie and Simon looked at him sometimes, with a wariness that cut Magnus to the core, like he was waiting for his eyes to darken and his teeth to sharpen. Like he was waiting for him to attack. 

He wasn’t used to it from Alec, though. Alec, whom he desperately wanted to impress, despite only knowing him for a few days.

“Leave our little undead-head alone,” Jace said, slouching in his seat until his shoulder touched Magnus’. “The guy did die a while ago. There’s bound to be some side-effects. I’m surprised he hasn’t just absorbed his food through sheer force of will.” He nudged Magnus’ shoulder, and Magnus nudged him back gratefully. 

“He didn’t die, you moron,” Simon muttered, and then he made a strangely broken sound as he sipped his coffee, eyes shut tightly as he inhaled deeply. They all paused to look at him, eyebrows raised, and then there was a soft thump where Jace’s foot connected with Simon’s ankle beneath the table. Simon jolted hard in surprise, but managed not to spill a single drop of coffee. He had his priorities, after all. Personally, Magnus didn’t see the big deal about coffee. 

He had tried some that morning, an act born out of curiosity as he watched Simon make it with old, stale coffee grains in the cupboard of the B&B. It had tasted like tar and dirt, and he had spat it out immediately whilst Jace laughed and pounded him on the back. 

“Keep your feet to yourself, you oaf,” Simon said scathingly.

“Stop making out with your drink, then. Jesus, it’s just coffee.”

“Just coffee?” Simon demanded. He held his drink aloft and kicked Jace back, and soon there was a fully-fledged war taking place beneath Table 23 of the little café just off the motorway. Magnus took advantage of the distraction to quietly inhale the rest of his burger, and then he hesitantly stole most of Jace’s chips, transferring them from one plate to the other and digging in immediately with a soft, pleased sound. Ever since he had dug into the snacks at the hotel room he had been abnormally hungry all of the time, and he had a feeling that it wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. 

Alec watched him in amusement, and Magnus pulled a face at him. Alec’s face seemed to brighten, his grin growing. 

“Children, please,” Alec said, pushing his plate away. He had barely touched it. “Enough squabbling. We still need to work out how to get to Professor Arnold.” 

Professor Arnold. Magnus looked up at Alec, who was pointedly not looking at Magnus. The conditions in the hotel room had been that they wouldn’t ask each other questions, but Magnus’s curiosity was eating him up from the inside. He wanted to know where they were going and why they were going there. He wanted to ask about the body. He wanted to question the tired, mournful look that graced Alec’s face whenever he thought nobody was looking. 

“Did you bring the map in with you?” Simon asked, ducking back out of the way as Jace attempted to smack his drink out of his hand. 

Alec had three maps. The first was a large store-bought map that easily covered the bonnet of the car, stretching from the furthest fringes of London to Land’s End, and up to Scotland and Wales. The second was smaller and pictured the bottom half of the first map in greater detail, naming some of the little towns and villages that made up the South-West. It was a mess of wriggling lines that writhed through the countryside; some had been there when purchased and some had been drawn on in different coloured markers. 

“I have part of it,” Alec said, waving the folded bit of sodden paper around. 

The third map was a complete secret, and Simon had just ripped it in half. Alec still sounded pretty bitter about it, which Magnus supposed was fair. He swallowed the last of his food, took a quick gulp of water, and then wiped his greasy fingers on Jace’s sleeve whilst the other boy was occupied. Simon saw him and snorted with surprised laughter. 

“We need new maps, then,” Jace said. “I still don’t get why you won’t just buy a Sat Nav. They’re cheap as hell nowadays, if you just buy the simple ones without all the fancy shit attached.”

“You just want one because of the sexy voices telling you where to go,” Alec said, rolling his eyes. 

“What’s a Sat Nav?” Magnus asked, testing the words out. They didn’t sound like proper words, but rather a phrase that had been coined from something else. The other three shot him a strange look when he spoke, but it didn’t last as long as previous stares had. They were getting used to his slow, unsure speech, to his light, confused tone of voice when he didn’t understand something. 

“It stands for Satellite Navigation system,” Simon explained, grabbing one of Jace’s questing hands and bending it backwards. Jace let out a surprisingly high-pitched shriek and yanked his hand away, scowling, whilst Simon continued to explain without missing a beat. “It’s a device that plugs into your car. You put your location in, as well as the location you want to arrive at, and it uses the Internet to find a series of maps of the area and direct you to your destination.”

Magnus decided not to ask about the Internet. 

“Pretty handy,” Jace said, frowning down at his mostly-empty plate. “Especially if you’re in a new area and don’t know where the fuck you’re going, like we are. Unfortunately, Alec’s an old man trapped in a buff teenagers body and he hates technology and enjoys making life as difficult as possible for everyone involved.”

“I don’t hate it,” Alec protested exasperatedly, as though he’d been subject to this comparison a hundred times already. “I just don’t know how to use it and everything changes so quickly that you don’t have time to get used to something before it’s being upgraded and remodelled.”

“I notice you didn’t deny the rest of it, though,” Jace said. “I think you might have gained a few more grey hairs just this morning.” He tapped his own head and grinned smugly when Alec flipped him off. 

All unnecessary detritus was shoved to the sides as the map was spread out across the table. Magnus used the condiments nearby to keep the corners of the map from rolling back, although there wasn’t much chance of that; the rain that had ripped the map had thoroughly dampened the paper, leaving it flat and wilting. Alec traced a watery red line down the map and sighed as he reached the ragged end. There were other lines on the map too that looked like they had been drawn on, but the ink had begun to run, and Magnus couldn’t read the little squiggles of words that accompanied them. 

“We definitely need a new one,” Simon announced. 

“Well spotted.”

“It would be a good idea to get specific maps of specific towns, too,” Simon continued. “There’s lots of them clustered around, and I guarantee we’ll get lost about a hundred times. That’s what happened when my parents took me camping as a special holiday treat.” He said the words ‘special holiday treat’ the way one would say ‘triple homicide.’

“You still don’t know which town we’re supposed to head to, do you?” Alec said, something like disappointment in his eye as he studied the map. 

“I’m not a magician,” Simon snapped. “All you’ve given me is a name and a County. Do you know how many professors there are down here? And do you know how many of them have the last name Arnold? Lots, that’s how many.”

Alec looked at him sternly. “We have to find him, Simon. Unless you want to be on the run for the rest of your damn life, we need to find this man and get him to talk to us. It’s either that or we take our chances with the thing that’s chasing us.”

“Man,” Simon said, in a voice that brooked no argument. “It’s not a thing that’s chasing us, it’s a man, and I’m trying, alright? It’s not exactly easy to research when all I have is a phone and very little data.”

“I trust that you can find him,” Alec said patiently, and Simon’s cheeks grew warm. 

Jace caught Magnus’ eye and jerked his head at the window. When Magnus just frowned, confused, Jace heaved a sigh and then shoved gently at his uninjured shoulder until he tumbled out of his seat, and then they were both up and moving outside. Jace waved jauntily at the middle-aged woman behind the counter, and the apples of her cheeks blushed a rosy red.

Directly outside the café was a large car park, bustling with people. Magnus felt a little overwhelmed as he crept closer to Jace, almost stepping on his heels. Everyone was a bright burst of colour and noise, a streak of oil on the tarmac, pebbles in the river. Purple cardigans and floral dresses and headscarves and spectacles and big bulky boots. Handbags swung from elbows as they swept through the car park. 

The rest-stop was made up of several car parks and a large glass building that housed all the other utilities and cafés. Jace insisted that there were bigger, bolder, louder places in the world, filled with even more shops and people, but Magnus couldn’t believe it. It was so much. He craned his neck to watch the light glint off of the tall windows and almost bumped into a man with a large furry hood thrown up over his head. 

Jace grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him along. “Come on, stop dawdling. There’s got to be somewhere around here that sells maps and stuff like that, right?” 

They found a store, eventually, that sold small trinkets, sweets and car paraphernalia. Jace led him through a handful of aisles, throwing out short, amused replies whenever Magnus pointed at something and asked what it was. He was particularly taken by the strange curved cushions that people wore around their necks in their cars. They ambled to a stop beside a rack of postcards. On the wall behind them hung a selection of road maps. Little labels had been printed off and stuck underneath them, proclaiming odd names and titles. 

Jace studied them with a frown before he grabbed three off the wall and stalked towards the counter, digging around in the pockets of his low jeans for change. Magnus hung back, studiously avoiding the crowd of people outside of the shop. He found it odd, that as much as he craved the warmth and noise of humanity, his mind hunkered down in the face of it like a small, broken child. Part of him was afraid that he had become so used to silence and small spaces that he would never feel at home anywhere else. 

But that wasn’t quite right, he told himself. Alec’s car already felt like a safe space to him, regardless of how broken it was now, regardless of how little time Magnus had spent in it. Hours, at the most, and yet he felt warm and safe and calm inside the metal walls. 

Jace moved closer to the till and a figure joined the end of the queue. Magnus glanced at him and grew rigid with fear when he saw it; a face of white bone peered out from beneath a black hood. Empty eye sockets seemed to bore through Magnus’s soul, right into the frightened heart of him. The mouth was a gaping abyss. 

The hood dropped down over the image and the figure turned, taking another step towards Jace. It was the same thing that had stalked into the bar, the same thing that killed the receptionist at the hotel, Magnus was sure of it. He made a furious gesture at Jace, who caught the action out of the corner of his eye and arched an eyebrow before shaking his head derisively. 

“Magnus, where’s Jace? The car’s almost ready.” 

Alec tapped Magnus on the shoulder and he wheeled around, fist flying out in a panic. Alec caught it inches from his face and stared, shocked, at Magnus’s clenched fingers. Simon was the one to swear and shove both of their hands down, glancing around to make sure nobody saw them. 

“Someone’s a bit jumpy,” Alec said, laughing softly. “What’s wrong?” 

Magnus whipped around again, peering around the rack of sweets. “Jace is in the queue, and that thing that followed us to the hotel is there too, just behind him.”

Alec’s face went wooden. He joined Magnus at the corner of the aisle. Simon’s head appeared on top of Alec’s, and they all peered around the edge of the rack. Jace seemed to sense their gazes on him, because he turned again, maps halfway to the counter, and then did a double-take. After a particularly incredulous second of staring, he mouthed, “What the fuck are you doing?” 

“See the figure in the hood?” Magnus hissed. 

“Oh, is that him?” Simon asked scathingly. “The conspicuously cloaked figure holding a knife? I assumed it was the old woman in the bonnet behind him looking for her teeth.”

Magnus looked again and frowned. “There is no old woman looking for her teeth.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Simon said. He rolled his eyes, shoved his glasses up his nose and then grabbed Magnus by the sleeve. “Magnus and I will get the car running, Alec–”

Alec scrambled out from behind the rack and sprinted towards Jace. 

“–Go and get us all killed,” Simon finished grimly. “Shit.” 

“What do we do?” Magnus asked. The figure was still standing there, looming closer and closer, and there was a knife gleaming in his hands. Magnus watched as Alec skidded to a stop, barrelling into Jace and sending them both flying, as well as another spinning rack of postcards. The woman behind the counter let out a piercing shriek as her display clattered to the floor, and Simon sighed. 

“We run and get the car started,” Simon said, and then he pulled Magnus out of the shop. 

They raced across the car park, feet pounding against warped tarmac. The heat had begun to creep into the day and the sun burned the back of Magnus’s neck as he ran, his ankles aching, until they made it to the garage halfway across the lot. Magnus could see the Toyota sitting in the sunshine, its windows gleaming and the bonnet propped open. A man dressed in overalls cleaned his hands on a dirty rag as he surveyed the jumble of mechanics and wires inside the car. There was no smoke, which was a definite improvement. 

“We need the car now,” Simon said, as they both staggered to a stop in front of the man. “It’s an emergency.” 

“Luckily for you, I just finished. But I need the owner to sign the release, and there’s the matter of insurance, and payment,” the man said. Magnus glanced behind him and squinted across the car park, but there was no sign of Alec and Jace. He thought he could hear shouting in the distance, though, and he desperately hoped that nobody was hurt. 

“The owner is indisposed, and I was here when he brought the car in,” Simon said in a clipped tone. “We brought the car in together. Look, we need the car, and I have the keys, and the payment can be done right now.” He fished out his wallet and waved it at the man, who looked bored. He flung the rag over his shoulder and beckoned Simon over to the desk in the corner of the garage, tucked away behind boxes of equipment and a strange-looking piece of machinery that looked dangerous. Magnus edged away from it and continued to stare across the car park, waiting anxiously. 

Simon and the man bickered with each other. Magnus shifted his weight from foot to foot. The clock on the wall of the garage ticked repeatedly, and across the car park, the doors to the shop burst open and Jace and Alec flew through them. 

“Simon, we need to go now!” 

Simon glanced up agitatedly and then reached into his wallet and pulled out a credit card. He shoved it in the machine, punched in several numbers despite the man protesting loudly, and then plied the man with fistfuls of notes as an added measure. 

“Get in the car,” Simon ordered him. He clicked the button on the keys and Magnus scrambled towards the car, climbing over their bags and into the bag seat. Simon threw himself into the front seat and twisted the keys in the ignition, frowning in concentration. 

“Can you drive?” Magnus asked. 

Simon didn’t reply. The car sped out of the garage before Magnus had a chance to put his seatbelt on and he almost flew across the seats before he grabbed the headrest in front of him. Simon’s face was pinched with fear as he screeched to a stop near Alec and Jace, who staggered towards the car, relief pasted all over their faces. 

Magnus pulled Jace into the back seat and then scrambled over, buckling himself in. The doors slammed shut and Simon pressed his foot down hard on the gas. 

A shot ran through the air as they turned a corner and the window beside Magnus’s head shattered. Screams echoed in the air and Magnus ducked down, breathing hard, eyes wide. There was glass all over his legs and he thought some might have sliced his face, but he was breathing. The shot had missed. 

“Shit, Magnus, are you okay?” Jace had crouched down too. Magnus stared at him, still gasping for breath, and shook his head. He hid his face in his hands and focused on the way the car moved underneath him, listened to the screams fading as they drove farther and farther away. 

The bullet had torn straight through the glass and embedded itself in the door opposite, close to where Jace’s arm had been resting. They were all shaken as they got back on the motorway, pausing in a layby only long enough for Alec to swap seats with Simon. They climbed over each other awkwardly rather than stepping outside the relative safety of the car, and once Alec was in the drivers’ seat, he pressed down on the accelerator and didn’t stop. 

“I know you said not to ask questions,” Magnus said hoarsely, when he could breathe again. “But I almost died again, and I’d like to know why.” 

Simon sucked in a breath and glanced at Alec. Jace frowned. Alec didn’t say anything. 

“We can’t drive around with one of the windows missing,” Jace said lightly, and Magnus’s heart clenched. They were ignoring him. “Especially not on the motorway, I’ll get blown to bits.”

“I notice you’re the only one complaining.”

“We can tape it up when we get there,” Alec said firmly, unmoved. “I don’t want to stop and give that thing a chance to catch up with us. You could have been killed back there.”

“Why are you saying it like it’s my own fault?” 

“It’s nobody’s fault,” Alec cried, and silence fell. Magnus didn’t think he had ever heard anyone sound as pained as Alec did just then. Alec flexed his hands on the wheel. He stopped, his mouth working, and then he said, softer, “It’s nobody’s fault except mine.”

Jace caught Simon’s eye and leaned forward. “Alec, this isn’t your fault. You didn’t ask for any of this.”

“I dragged you into this,” Alec muttered.

“It was my family too,” Jace said fiercely, hands clenching on air. There was grief on his face. “You didn’t drag us into anything.”

“If anything happens to any of you–”

“Then it’s the fault of whoever hurt us,” Simon interrupted. “Or possibly Jace, since he’s always doing stupid things.” 

“Oi. I’m still here, you know.” 

“The point is, we made the choice to come along with you on our own. You aren’t responsible for us. We chose this.” 

They stayed quiet as Alec pondered this. Magnus could tell that he didn’t want to believe it, but he could also tell that Jace and Simon weren’t about to let him go along piling things onto his shoulders if they could help it. It was a fierce friendship, what they had, and once again, Magnus felt like an intruder. Like a cuckoo in a perfectly steady nest. 

“I know I told you not to ask questions, Magnus, but I think you have a right to.” 

Magnus whipped his head up and stared at Alec. Alec kept his eyes on the road. 

“You didn’t ask for this, but you’re with us now, and I don’t think you’ll be safe on your own, at least for the moment, anyway. When we get to Professor Arnold’s house, I’ll tell you everything. I promise.” 

Magnus cleared his throat. “And if I still want to stay, after you’ve told me everything?” 

Alec jolted in surprise, as if the thought hadn’t even occurred to him. But then he craned his neck around for a brief moment and grinned brilliantly. Magnus felt himself grow warm, all the way down to the tips of his toes. 

“Then I guess you’ll have to get used to Jace’s snoring.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you! Please leave a comment and a kudos if you liked it, let me know what you thought. And come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr. Thank you so much!


	10. The Boy in the Bay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “At the next roundabout, take a right,” Simon said.
> 
> “Our own personal Sat-Nav,” Jace muttered. “It’s a shame about the sexy voices though.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! New chapter, and in the next one, you get... Answers! Actual answers! There's still a lot left of this story, but we're getting closer now. I really hope you enjoy it, thank you so much for the lovely response on the last chapter, it fuels me! Thanks!

“Take a left.” 

Jace groaned, clutching his stomach. “No lefts, or rights, or turns. Can’t you just go in a straight line down a road that doesn’t have any bumps in it? Jesus, it’s like being on a rollercoaster.” 

“Except that you’ve never been on a rollercoaster,” Simon said, grinning rather evilly. “You’re too afraid to even go near them.” 

“There’s only one thing on this earth that I’m afraid of, and they quack.”

They had been doing this for the past half an hour. Every time the conversation lulled, Simon or Jace would make fun of each other and Magnus would learn something new. Jace told him embarrassing stories from their days at school and college, Alec would chip in with all the stupid things he and Jace had done when they were younger, and Simon took great joy in detailing all of Jace’s awful dates and embarrassing pick-up lines. It made Magnus cringe from second-hand embarrassment, but it was worth it. He felt included. He felt as though he were simply in a car with friends, driving somewhere nice on a weekend. It was enough that he almost began to forget about the chaos they had left behind them. 

The bumpy road turned onto a main street, and then back onto the motorway that Alec had turned off a few miles back. He had been avoiding all of the main roads and taking lots of twisting turns, lots of back roads, but he still drove with a sense of urgency. They had somewhere to be, after all, even if Magnus didn’t exactly know where that was. 

“It’s a precaution,” Alec explained, when Jace complained about another hole-ridden road. “If someone’s coming after us then they’ll use all of the motorways and main roads. I’m trying to make sure we don’t get killed.” 

Simon spread the new maps out in the front of the car and examined them carefully. He passed one back to Magnus and told him to look for a town that said Polzeath. Then he glanced back after a thoughtful moment and said, “You can read, can’t you?” 

“I can read,” Magnus said defensively. He didn’t know why he felt irritated, but there was something familiar about the moment that triggered a prickle of annoyance at the back of his mind. A memory, perhaps, that hadn’t come to fruition yet, still blooming in the dark, deprived corners of his brain. 

Simon flushed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Don’t be so insulting,” Jace said, kicking the back of Simon’s chair. He knocked ankles with Magnus and then leaned over to help him search the map, which was littered with little green lines and dots. The words were small, written in neat letters, and Magnus had to squint to see them. 

“There’s no Polzeath on here,” Jace said, after several minutes of frustrated searching. “Are you sure you’ve gotten the name right? It definitely said Polzeath?” 

Simon made a frustrated sound. “It said Polsegh, which is the name of Polzeath in Cornish, as far as I can tell. Hang on, let me check something.” He whipped out his phone and began to mutter as he typed, and Magnus dripped his fingers along the maps while he waited. 

It didn’t look like much on a two-dimensional drawing, but the world was bursting with places and people. Magnus studied the little lines and marvelled over how many people had walked them, how many people lived in little clusters of houses along the roads and paths and towns. There were so many places in the world, and Magnus didn’t belong to any of them. 

He could feel it with deep certainty inside him. He didn’t need to sleep to see things that made no sense; every time he blinked, he was assaulted with images of things he couldn’t understand. There were snapshots of wilting flowers and glowing suns, pieces of landscapes that faded in and out of view. He saw faces, too, that had never been human and that had yet to be human. He could see blood-soaked, mud-slick battlegrounds. And then he opened his eyes again, and the world was still here, waiting for him. And then he blinked again, and an old one rushed back to him. 

It was disorientating, to say the least, and it was getting worse the further South-West they drove. 

“I need to know where I’m going,” Alec said anxiously. “I know you said we were going in roughly the right direction, but we don’t have time to be wrong about this. Do we take another turning soon? Shall I just keep heading West?”

Simon clicked his fingers triumphantly. “Hayle Bay. It’s in St Minver Parish and it’s called Hayle Bay on the maps, but it’s local name is Polzeath Bay. Can you see it?” 

“I saw that earlier,” Magnus muttered, and retraced the line with his finger. Jace passed him a felt-tip pen that had been chewed at one end and Magnus circled Hayle Bay, drawing a wobbly line to mark their path before he handed the map back to Simon. 

“At the next roundabout, take a right,” Simon said.

“Our own personal Sat-Nav,” Jace muttered. “It’s a shame about the sexy voices though.”

The drive to Polzeath took them another half an hour, with Alec taking every back road he could without getting them hopelessly lost. When they came to the first sign stating Polzeath, Magnus couldn’t help but feel a thrill of excitement. They were getting close to their destination; Magnus was getting close to his answers. Jace seemed to grow more and more reluctant the closer they grew to the town, and he kept shooting Magnus suspicious glances out of the corner of his eye. 

Magnus was too busy staring out of his window to care, but he definitely noticed. It was hard to care, though, when he could see the ocean. 

It was larger than Magnus could comprehend. He couldn’t find the words to describe the fear and wonder that bubbled up inside him at the sight of such vast beauty. 

“Have you ever seen it before?” Jace blurted out, and Magnus didn’t even care about the slip-up. He shook his head, breathless, and then turned back to the window. 

The main road was closed. Alec turned off into a car park at the top of a cliff with a frown and clambered out to pay for a ticket. Magnus scrambled out of the car after him and followed him to the meter, but when he got there he simply stared over the edge of the cliffs. His stomach dropped to his feet and he swayed dizzily, a sick feeling churning within him. He couldn’t look away, though. It was so blue, and green, with veins of purple running through it, and he had expected the size, but there was no way he could have prepared for the constant motion, the swaying and lulling of waves. 

When he turned back, the others were watching him with amusement, apart from Simon, who examined the distance between Magnus’s shoes and the edge of the cliff with distaste. 

“It’s like watching a kid,” Jace laughed. “I wonder what kind of things we could make him do. Hey, Zombie, have you ever eaten a lemon?”

Magnus’s mouth was empty, but his eyes began to water, and his mouth tingled as the foreign taste of something sweetly sour coated his tongue. He swallowed, wincing. He didn’t think he liked lemons much. 

“I wonder why the main road’s closed,” Simon said, frowning. “It runs right along the sea front, so you’d expect them to keep it open, especially as it’s almost tourist season.” 

“Let’s go and find out,” Alec suggested. 

There was some sort of festival happening in the town. They came to a stop in the centre of the main street and sat in a row on a low stone wall, carefully avoiding trampling the flowerbeds around them. A few eagle-eyed locals watched them beadily before turning back to the festivities, but Magnus could feel their glances every now and again and shrunk in on himself. 

It was a surprisingly warm day, even for spring. A breeze blew through the village, bringing with it the scent of salt and sea-spray and tickling the edges of the strings of bunting that lined each shop and criss-crossed the street, sending the colourful flags fluttering. There didn’t seem to be a theme regarding the colours or the decoration, but there were children prancing across the square, dressed in large papier-mâché costumes to make them look like raindrops and flowers, so perhaps it was merely a celebration of the season. 

Magnus watched a child skip past in a blue dress with a dinky white collar and smiled. She had chocolate on her cheek and she laughed as a woman, presumably her mother, scrubbed it away with a tissue. He watched for a moment longer, unable to look away as the mother twirled her daughter around. There was a boy sat in a pram beside them, fast asleep and drooling all over his blanket. 

“What do you think all of this is for?” Magnus asked, gesturing at the flags and the crowd and the empty bandstand, where someone seemed to be struggling with a pile of trumpets. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“You might have,” Jace pointed out unhelpfully. “Maybe you lived somewhere like this once. Maybe you dressed up like a big sunflower and pranced about. It’s not like you’d know either way, is it?”

Frowning, Magnus dug his fingers into his jeans and watched as the band filed onto the stage and struck up a lively tune. One of the trumpets tumbled to the floor and the resulted clash was enough to make the crowd wince and back up a few steps. There was a sharp sound as Alec leaned around Simon and Magnus to punch Jace in the shoulder. 

“Don’t be an ass,” Alec muttered, low enough that Magnus almost didn’t hear him. And then, louder, “The more important question is, how are we supposed to find Professor Arnold in all of this?”

“I don’t know.” Jace shrugged. “Ask someone, I guess. It’s a small town, so someone’s bound to know him. Isn’t that what it’s like in small towns? Everyone knows everyone?” 

“You have got to stop watching daytime television,” Simon said. “This isn’t one of your soaps.” 

Jace had explained soaps to Magnus, who privately thought that their adventure so far had been quite accurate as far as soaps went. A lot of death and confusion and people coming back to life. 

“I wish I had the damn address,” Alec muttered, digging around in his pocket. “We could have found him by now if I just knew where he lived. All I’ve got is his name and the Polsegh.”

Simon clucked his tongue. “Coffee. We need coffee and somewhere with internet access.”

Magnus privately thought that Simon had an addiction to coffee, but he brooked no protest as they made their way across the street, past the bandstand and into a bustling café that sat between a charity shop and an ice cream parlour. 

It was a little too warm in the café, even for Magnus, who was only wearing a jumper. The other boys shed their coats and sat in a booth at the front of the café, squabbling over menus and money. Magnus bumped into a woman with a cloud of greying hair who glared at him briefly until he apologised. Then she stopped, did a quick scan that left him feeling intensely scrutinized before her expression softened slightly. 

“You here visiting, love?” she asked. “You don’t look local.”

Magnus glanced down at his muddy jeans and shoes that were falling off his feet. He wondered what local looked like. 

“He’s with us,” Jace piped up, reaching over to snag the hem of Magnus’s jumper. The woman gave him a shrewd look that extended to Simon and Alec, as though she suspected them of kidnapping him and forcing him to come and drink coffee. Then she patted Magnus’s shoulder with a warm look as he fell into the seat beside Jace. 

“You should feed him up a bit,” the woman said. “He looks like he hasn’t eaten in years. We’ve got all sorts of cakes and biscuits up the front if you fancy a bite to eat. Don’t hesitate to ask.”

Magnus caught a glimpse of a badge bearing her name before she turned away with a kind smile. Tabitha. It suited her. 

“You just attract all sorts, don’t you?” Jace said. “Here, budge over. It’s my turn to get drinks. What do you want?” 

Magnus flicked a cursory glance over the menu before shrugging politely. Jace rolled his eyes and stalked off towards the front instead of waiting for a waitress. 

Simon and Alec were arguing again, so they didn’t notice when Magnus politely called Tabitha back over to the table. There weren’t many other people in the café, and she didn’t seem busy, so she came willingly, smiling.

“How can I help you, dear?” 

“We came here to look for someone,” Magnus said. The lies spilled out without prompting. “He’s a friend of the family, and we didn’t have his address, but we have urgent news for him. He’s a Professor, and we know he lives in Polzeath Bay, but we don’t know where.” 

Tabitha regarded him with surprise. Whatever she had been expecting, it obviously wasn’t that. If she found it off, she didn’t let on, and rather began to look thoughtful. 

“It’s not much of a village,” Tabitha said. “There are houses around, of course, but the beach is mostly a tourist spot. I know for sure that there are no schools here, but there’s a village nearby called Threbetherick that might house who you’re looking for. 

“He’s definitely from here,” Magnus said, shaking his head firmly. “His name’s Professor Arnold and he’s from Polzeath Bay.”

Tabitha’s mouth fell open, and then she laughed. “We have a Professor Arnold, but she’s definitely not a young man, so that can’t be who you’re looking for. She’s lived here for years.”

“Sorry, did you say you found her, Magnus?” Jace interrupted, leaning appearing at Tabitha’s shoulder. Tabitha looked back and forth between them, suspicion growing on her face. 

“Now, then, what’s all this about? I thought you said you were looking for a man,” Tabitha said. The conversation at the table ground to a halt and Alec looked over, wide-eyed and panicked. 

Jace adopted an apologetic expression. “Magnus is a bit scatter-brained, I’m afraid. He must have gotten a little confused.”

Magnus did his best to look as bland as possible. He wore a slightly-too-wide smile when Tabitha looked at him.

“It’s my family that have the urgent news, I’m afraid, and we need to find Professor Arnold as soon as possible,” Jace continued. He faltered for a second, and then said, “There’s been a – there’s been a death. In the family. And we don’t have her address, but the funeral is soon, and we know Professor Arnold would like to come.”

Tabitha put a hand to her heart, softening. “Oh, how awful. I’m sorry to hear that, dear.” She shifted her weight uncomfortably for a second before she said, “I’m so sorry, my dears, but I just don’t feel comfortable giving her address to strangers. She’s lived in this village for so long, and she comes in for coffees all the time, and it just wouldn’t feel right, to tell four strange boys where she lives.” 

Alec shot a desperate look across the table, hands clenching around one of the menu’s. Magnus reached up and snagged the end of Tabitha’s sleeve before she could turn away, and made his voice as soft and unassuming as possible. 

“Do you think you could possibly give us her work address, ma’am? Or just the name of the college. That way we can send her a letter to tell her about the funeral. Just a letter.” 

Tabitha shifted, obviously torn. They all tried their best to look as pleading as possible, and eventually she sighed. “Just her work address, yes? Well, I don’t see the harm in that, then, so long as you promise that it’s just a letter.” 

“Just a letter, and we’ll be on our way,” Jace lied. Magnus knew it was so that Alec wouldn’t have to. 

Moments later, they were back on the street with a piece of card. An address was scrawled in cursive across the square, as well as a name: Professor Agatha Arnold. Magnus stayed quiet as they strode past the band, which had struck up a lively tune; children danced in the streets in small circles, hopping and skipping, and they wove their way through them. He felt bad, for tricking a kind-hearted old woman, but Alec looked so pleased that he couldn’t bring himself to ask if they thought it was wrong too. 

“We have her address now, and her real name, so she shouldn’t be that hard to find,” Alec said. “We just have to find out where the college is that she teaches in and ask to see her. That shouldn’t be too hard, should it? Simon, can you have a look on your phone, or on the maps? See if you can find out where we have to go?” 

“Already doing it,” Simon said distractedly. 

“And you bought more data, didn’t you, so we shouldn’t have to stop again for a while.” 

“We may need to stop sooner than you think,” Simon winced. 

Alec stopped in the middle of the street. “What?” 

Simon held up his phone. “It’s a Saturday. The college is a few villages over, and it isn’t open, and it won’t be until Monday. We’re going to have to stick around until it’s open and then see if we can find her.”

It was the first time Magnus had seen Alec look properly angry. His face changed, his expression flattening out. Magnus watched as he squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep, steadying breath, before slumping in on himself. 

“I thought this might be over soon,” Alec said quietly. He rubbed at his eyes whilst the others stayed silent, watching him. “I suppose that was wishful thinking. Come on, we should tape up the car window before we find somewhere to stay for the weekend. I don’t want Magnus to get blown away.” 

“What am I?” Jace said. “Chopped liver?”

Magnus wrinkled his nose. 

“Don’t hurt yourself, Zombie. It’s just an expression.” 

They bought supplies in a corner shop and headed back to the car park, equal parts pleased and disappointed. Jace sat on the bonnet of the car and ate cereal out of the plastic bag whilst Alec cut up the box to use as a makeshift window. 

“We lied to that woman,” Magnus said quietly, when Simon drifted over to watch the proceedings with amusement. “Tabitha was only trying to keep Professor Arnold safe, and we lied to her. It felt like a trick.” 

Simon winced. “I’m sorry that you got dragged into it.”

“You’re not sorry that it happened, though, are you?” 

Simon shook his head as Alec ripped off a piece of duct tape with his teeth. “We needed that information, and that was the only way to get it. I’m not saying it wasn’t wrong, but we’ve done a lot of things that aren’t right recently. You don’t understand this yet, but we really are only doing what we need to. It’s necessary, Magnus, or we wouldn’t be doing this at all.”

“Maybe if someone explained everything to me, I’d be able to understand,” Magnus suggested. 

“I promised you that we would explain everything,” Alec said suddenly, and Magnus jumped. He hadn’t realised that Alec was listening. “We just have to get somewhere safe and I promise, Magnus, I’ll tell you everything. This isn’t the place, though. Anything could be listening.”

“Anyone,” Simon said prissily. He rolled his eyes and stalked back to his seat in the car to examine the maps. Magnus watched him go thoughtfully. If Simon didn’t believe his own friends when they said that something dangerous was following them, what were the chances that he would believe whatever Magnus chose to tell them? Because he would have to tell them. He could tell that Alec didn’t want to share everything that had led to this with a stranger, and Magnus liked to think that whoever he had been, before he lost his memory, had been a fair person. Secrets like these required a trade, and Magnus would have to give the others his story in return for theirs. 

But would they believe him? 

Magnus dragged his hands along his jeans in a soothing motion until he felt calm again. Would they laugh him out of the room? Would they think he was lying, that he was mocking them? Would they leave him behind? Magnus didn’t know, and he had no way of knowing. He knew the truth, though, and that was that nobody could have been buried beneath the earth for years without dying. Nobody could see wonderful, terrible things every time they closed their eyes. Nobody could feel the whispers of the earth and the call of the sea through the air and the ground. 

They wouldn’t believe him, but it was all true, and Magnus would have to tell them anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you! Really hope you enjoyed it. Can't wait for the next few chapters. Please leave a comment/kudos, I really love hearing from you all. And come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr, or @cococranberries on twitter. Thank you!


	11. The Boy in the Bed and Breakfast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You were going to tell me everything,” he prompted quietly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next - three? Three - chapters, are all about answering lots of questions. There's still quite a bit left to the mystery, but we're getting there. So in the next one, you find out whose body was buried. Let me know if you think you've figured it out, I'd love to know! And thank you for the lovely response, I hope you enjoy this chapter just as much.

Alec seemed to grow tenser as they finally left the town. Magnus felt a tug of sadness as he craned his neck to watch the fluttering flags disappear through the rear window. The silken sea still stretched out beside him, and Magnus watched the waves rear up and crash against the shore until it hurt to look. Then he turned to Jace, instead, who was singing along badly to a country song on the radio. He kept stuffing handfuls of dry cereal into his mouth between lines, so the lyrics came out garbled and accompanied with a spray of crumbs. 

Magnus blinked, and a white wall rose up in his mind, brick by brick. It was burning, smoke coalescing around the top of the wall, which would soon be nothing more than a crumbling ruin. He blinked again, and sighed as the images faded. 

The first Bed and Breakfast that they tried was full, but the second one had an available room. Simon paid at the counter and Magnus helped Jace carry their bags up the stairs. Jace groaned the whole time and then collapsed dramatically on one of the beds. 

“So,” Alec said, when he came up with the last bags. “We might have to make up beds on the floor, but it’s better than sleeping in the car. And we still have our sleeping bags.” 

“It’s much nicer than the one that blew up,” Magnus agreed. There was no dust on the surfaces, and the blankets and sheets were freshly washed, smelling like fabric softener. A sign downstairs had said that there would be a complimentary breakfast, and although the decoration was sparse, everything looked clean and welcoming. Blue walls enveloped them and a model of a white boat stood proudly on the bedside table. The sails flapped lightly in the salty breeze that slid in through the open window. 

Jace snorted. “I still want to know what happened there. I don’t think it was an earthquake, no matter what Simon said. No earthquake does that to a house.” 

Magnus privately agreed. 

“You were going to tell me everything,” he prompted quietly. Alec sighed, his shoulders dropping in a resigned fashion, as though he had been waiting for this. 

“Jesus, Magnus, let him sit down first,” Jace said, scowling suddenly. 

Magnus shrank in on himself, sitting down on the opposite bed and tucking his hands up under his sleeves. 

“It’s not like we owe you an explanation anyway,” Jace continued snappishly. “And it’s not like you’ve been honest either. What happened to you, hey?” 

“I was buried alive and I don’t know why,” Magnus snapped back. “Forgive me if I don’t want to talk about it.” 

Jace looked shocked for a moment, and Magnus realised he had yelled. He shrank back even further, recoiling from the tension in the air. There was a jittery feeling rushing through his blood in waves, and he jiggled his leg to relieve it, but it did nothing. He understood Simon’s urge to pace, now, and was about to do so when the door clicked open. 

“There are no blood-soaked walls or screaming, insane women, so this place is already on my top-ten list,” said Simon as the door slipped shut behind him. He toed off his shoes and dug his toes into the carpet, sighing happily. “I can’t wait to sleep in a proper, clean bed.”

“And shower,” Jace added longingly. “We all desperately need a shower. Zombie is the cleanest one out of all of us, and he popped up out of the ground not long ago.”

“I call dibs,” Simon said, and he almost brained himself on the side of the bed trying to leap over a bag. He was inside the bathroom before Alec could get out a word of protest, and Jace simply sighed and dropped down against the pillows. 

“What’s a dib?” Magnus asked. “It sounds like a sea-creature.”

Alec laughed kind of helplessly. “I’m pretty sure that’s not the question you really want to ask, is it? Go on, Magnus. You ask me a question, and I’ll try my best to answer it.”

Magnus thought carefully for a moment before he said, “Why are you letting me do this?”

Alec looked surprised. He obviously hadn’t expected that kind of question. Magnus tried to smile warmly at him, but he wasn’t sure it worked, because Alec looked away quickly. 

“I don’t want there to be secrets between us. Simon and Jace know everything already, even if they choose not to believe some of it.” He said the last part a little bitterly as the sound of water running filtered in through the door. “You’re a part of this now, whether you like it or not. I’m not sure if I can keep you safe for as long as you’re with us, but I don’t want to just abandon you. And I think you’ve earned the right to know certain things.”

“It’s not your job to keep us all safe,” Jace said firmly. “We made the decision to come with you on our own, and Magnus’s going to make the same decision if he chooses to stay with us, aren’t you?”

Magnus nodded silently. He didn’t know how to tell them how grateful he was that he wasn’t being kicked out, that they hadn’t left him behind ages ago. 

“I want to know where I came from,” Magnus said slowly, the words awkward on his tongue. “I want to know if I have a family somewhere. But you are the only people that I know in the world, and I won’t leave you if you need help. That doesn’t make me your responsibility though.”

It was possibly the longest, most well-thought out sentence he had said in their presence. 

“Well would you look at that,” Jace said, grinning. “It speaks. Nice to meet you, Magnus.”

Magnus shot him a puzzled look. “We’ve already introduced ourselves.”

Jace put one hand over his eyes and groaned. 

“Thank you, Magnus,” Alec said. “I promise, once this is all over, I’ll help you find out what happened to you, and if you have family left in the world, then we can find them too. You won’t be alone.” 

Magnus smiled brightly, and Alec sucked in a breath. He tucked his hands inside his sleeves again and listened to Simon whistle from the other room as he thought about all the other questions he had. Really, there was only one that he truly needed the answer to and it looked as if Alec knew this too, because he sighed when Magnus looked at him. 

“The body,” Magnus said quietly. “The one that you buried in my grave. I don’t need to know who it was, but… Did you kill them?” 

“Yes,” Jace said. 

“No,” Alec said calmly. “It was nobody’s fault. It isn’t what you think.”

Jace’s hands twisted in the sheets and he ground his teeth, staring up at the white ceiling. “It was my fault, and you know it. But if you’re asking if we murdered someone, on purpose, then no.”

“It was nobody’s fault,” Alec reiterated, and then he sighed. “Anything else?” 

Magnus tipped his head to the side. That was the most he was going to get, for the moment. 

“The people coming after you,” Magnus said. “What do they want? Why are they chasing you, trying to kill you? Something must have happened to make them this angry. And Jace called them things, not people, and one of them made a house explode. Who are they? What are they?” 

Alec seemed to measure his words carefully for a moment. “A few days ago, something happened to my… to my family. Something awful.” His voice grew hoarse and cracked, and then he straightened up, clearing his voice, all traces of grief erased from his face. “And then my mother disappeared. I don’t know where she went, and I don’t know how to find her on my own.”

“My mother left me a note, before we went on this trip. It said that I needed to find someone called Professor Arnold, and it had the word Polsegh written on it, so that we could find her. She also mentioned that there were people who would try to find us before we could find her. I can’t explain it all, Magnus, but there are monsters after us, and they… they aren’t human.”

Alec watched him carefully, as though he were waiting for Magnus to scoff or laugh or call him insane. But the truth was, Magnus couldn’t do any of those things. Alec’s words simply settled something deep within Magnus, something that he had already known. It was like a confirmation, rather than a revelation. Magnus nodded slowly, thoughtfully. 

“Can they do things?” Magnus asked. “Is that how they ruined that house? Like… magic?” 

Jace snorted. “We aren’t being chased by superheroes, but they definitely have some sort of abilities. Simon doesn’t really believe us when we say that these things aren’t human, even though he’s seen what they can do.”

“That’s because it simply isn’t possible.”

Simon opened the door in a cloud of steam, dressed in his jeans and roughly towelling his hair. His glasses were gone, and he looked younger, softer, without them. 

“They’re just people, criminals, who want us dead for reasons beyond which I can fathom, and I don’t think you should be filling Magnus’s head with all of this rubbish. One of them had a gun, for God’s sake. What would a powerful supernatural being need with a gun?” 

“We don’t know that it was a gun,” Jace argued. “Could have been some weird supernatural weapon for all we know.” 

“It’s not rubbish, and Magnus can make his own decisions about what he believes and doesn’t believe,” Alec said. Magnus didn’t know how he could stay so calm all the time. 

“What do you need from Professor Arnold?” Magnus asked, eager to steer the conversation away from the brewing argument. He could see Simon’s face twisting painfully. 

“My mother mentioned her before, although I still didn’t realise she was a woman,” Alec said, looking faintly amused. “Apparently, she’s an expert in folklore and mythology, and there are some questions we need to ask her about the monsters coming after us, some things we need her to look at. My mother held her in high regard, and she wouldn’t have told me to come here if she didn’t think Professor Arnold could help.”

“So, we find Professor Arnold and we ask her your questions, and then what?” 

Alec winced. “I haven’t really thought that far ahead.” 

Magnus looked at them each in turn, coming to the slow realisation that none of them really knew what they were doing. They were all just as lost as each other, groping around in the dark with no idea about what was lurking in the shadows. 

“I suppose that’s all of my questions,” Magnus said. It was a lie; the conversation had left him with more questions than he had answers, but Alec looked exhausted and wrung out, and Jace was half-asleep on the bed, and even Simon, who never seemed to show much of what he was thinking on his face, seemed ready to drop.

Alec flashed Magnus a grateful smile and then began divvying up the blankets. Magnus took a bundle of sheets and began to untangle them, smoothing his hands over them as he created a makeshift bed on the floor. When he turned back, Simon hadn’t moved. He was watching him with a fierce curiosity that unsettled Magnus, towel hanging loosely from his hands. 

“I have questions,” Simon said lightly.

Magnus froze, fingers bunched in the sheets. Alec’s eyes ticked between the two of them. 

“Later, Simon,” said Alec. “We all could do with some sleep before we start interrogating each other. And we still need to think of a way of talking with Professor Arnold—”

“It won’t take long,” Simon interrupted smoothly. 

“I don’t know if I’ll have any answers for you,” Magnus said, fiddling with the towel. “I still don’t remember much.” 

“But you remember some things,” Simon surmised. “It’s only fair, you ask us questions, and we ask you questions. We don’t know you, Magnus, but someone hated you enough to bury you alive. That makes me wonder what kind of person you are.” 

Nobody came to his rescue. 

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Magnus said, tripping over the words. “I don’t know what kind of person I am, and I don’t know why someone did that to me.” 

“You must remember something,” Simon pressed gently. 

Magnus did remember something. He remembered something huge, something that made sense deep in his heart but that would dissolve as soon as he spoke the words, he was sure. Saying it out loud would make it real. 

“You won’t believe me,” Magnus said quietly. 

And they wouldn’t. Who would believe that he had died, and been placed in the earth for three whole years before he was found and dug up, miraculously alive? That was the stuff of dreams, of stories. 

Jace scoffed. “We just told you that the things following us aren’t human.”

“Neither am I,” Magnus blurted out. 

There was a stunned silence, and then Alec coughed. Gently, as though he was trying not to set Magnus off, he said, “Magnus, what are you talking about? You’re as human as we are.” 

Magnus shook his head slowly. “You found me in a grave, in the middle of a field that hadn’t been disturbed in years. It took ten minutes for you to dig me out – I know, I could feel the shovel – and when you did, I was completely conscious.” 

Jace hesitated. “I’ll admit that all of that’s weird, but I also don’t see how that makes you inhuman. A medical miracle, maybe, but not something inhuman.” 

Magnus felt something in him sink. Jace didn’t believe him. Simon hadn’t said a word. He glanced at Alec, expecting to see the same hesitance there, but instead what he got was a calculating look. 

“There’s more, isn’t there?”

Magnus nodded. 

“Magnus, how long were you in that grave?” 

Magnus took a deep breath. This was it. 

“Three years,” Magnus said quietly. “I died one night, in a fire. I can remember the smoke, and the heat, and the smell. When I woke up, briefly, I was being put in the grave, but I couldn’t move or breathe. I was still dead on the outside. I stayed like that, in my grave, for three years. Until you three found me.” 

The silence seemed to grow like a living, breathing thing, creeping into every corner of the room. Magnus held his breath, looking at each of them in turn. Alec looked saddened, his face all creased up, and Jace looked completely horrified and Simon – Simon looked mad. 

“Well, this has been a night for revelations,” Jace said drolly. 

There was a popping noise as Simon sprang up from the bed and marched towards the door, and then it slammed open so hard that the doorframe creaked and shivered. He cast one last look at Magnus, one last, rage-filled look, and then he was gone. Magnus stared after him in shock, a hundred words on the tip of his tongue. Of all the people he had thought would have a problem with this, Simon wasn’t one of them. Simon, who was kind, if a bit snappish, who was brave, if a bit terrified, who was reassuring, if a bit clinical. 

Jace swore. Then he sighed, cast a meaningful glance at Alec, who nodded back, and took off out of the room. He clapped Magnus on the shoulder before he left, a simple, reassuring touch, and Magnus knew what he meant. _I’ll bring him back._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you! Please leave a comment and a kudos if you enjoyed this, and let me know what you thought, I'd love to hear from you. And come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion. Thank you!


	12. The Boy in the Bed and Breakfast II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a minute, Magnus didn’t think Alec was going to talk. And then Alec opened his mouth, and the story that poured from his lips made Magnus wish, later on, that they had both stayed quiet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part two of this little basket of revelations! One more chapter and then back to regular plot stuff. Thank you for the lovely response!

Alec looked at him soberly. His hands had a loose grip on each other, resting gently in his lap, but Magnus could tell that he wanted to clench them tightly together. He looked as if he might smash into a million pieces at the slightest noise. 

“You don’t seem that surprised,” said Magnus carefully. He was trying not to think about Simon, or Jace. “By what I said, I mean. About being in the ground for years. The others didn’t take it very well.” 

The door still shook from the way Simon had slammed it open. 

“It’s a big pill to swallow,” Alec said, his voice slow and melodic, soothing. “Jace will come around first. I think he already suspected something was up, so he just needs to let it stew for a while.” 

Magnus swallowed back his relief. He didn’t think he could cope with it if all three of them were mad at him. They were the only people in the world that he knew, and if they didn’t believe him, if they didn’t like him, then where did that leave him?

“What about Simon? He doesn’t believe me, does he? He thinks I’m making it up.” 

Alec hesitated. When he spoke, his voice was soft and placating, as if he knew Magnus wouldn’t like what he had to say. 

“We’re all going through a lot. It’s not that he doesn’t believe you, it’s that, on top of everything else that’s going on, it’s a lot to take in. I think he believes you deep down, but that’s the thing. He doesn’t want to. Because that makes everything too real, and it means that things are happening that he doesn’t have any control over, and it means the world is a lot bigger than he expected it to be.”

Magnus considered this for a moment. It wasn’t much of an answer, in many respects, but it was something. 

“Why are you taking this so well?” Magnus asked carefully. “Why do you believe me?” 

Alec tensed up again. His hands went back to his lap, fingers interlocked. 

A thought hit Magnus, and he sucked in a breath. “Do you believe me?”

Alec frowned. “I do.” 

“You’re not just humouring me? Because if that’s the case, I would rather you didn’t.”

“No, I believe you.”

“Why?” 

For a minute, Magnus didn’t think Alec was going to talk. And then Alec opened his mouth, and the story that poured from his lips made Magnus wish, later on, that they had both stayed quiet. 

“When I was five, I started to have nightmares,” Alec said, his expression serious. “I woke up in the middle of the night, every night, screaming and shaking and sweating. I was afraid of the things in my closet. I thought there were monsters under my bed. I was so certain of it, and so scared.”

“My dad was the one who came and calmed me down in the night. He’d sit there with me until I stopped shaking. He checked under the bed with me, and the closet, and behind the door. He’d sit me down and tell me all the ways that monsters were impossible. He was always very logical.” 

“He sounds nice,” Magnus said. He felt as though his words were insufficient, not enough, but Alec smiled at him. That smile made something inside of him feel warm, healed in some way. 

“One night, I woke up, and my mother was there instead of my father. She waited until I’d stopped crying, and then she said something that I’ll never forget.” 

Magnus lowered his voice. “What did she say?” 

“She said that if I was going to be afraid of monsters, then I was going to be afraid of the right ones.” Alec gave up on looking casual and gripped his knees tightly. From this angle, he was shrouded in dark, all shadows and angles. His eyes were black pools. “Real monsters, she said, didn’t hide in my bedroom. They were out there in the world. The Dancing Man didn’t chase little boys. Walker prowled different streets to ours. Freak wouldn’t fit in the space under my bed. She told me all these stories about people who were monsters on the inside and the outside, and I believed them.”

He looked up, and his gaze pierced straight through Magnus. “I still believe them. And not in a childish way, either, but in the way you believe in cups and cars and water and air. In everyday things. That’s why it’s so easy to believe you. There are things out there that we can’t understand, things that we can’t fight or explain. You’re just another one of those things.” 

Something in Magnus’s chest sunk lower and lower inside of him. He was grateful that Alec believed him, that he wasn’t simply humouring him, waiting for the first convenient moment to dump him like he was crazy and drive away. But Magnus didn’t want to be something inexplicable, a mystery, a monster. He wanted to be a person, with a past and a family, with a mind and memories. 

He wanted to be human. 

“These monsters,” Magnus said hesitantly. “What were they like? Did you ever meet one?”

Another silence, this time full of dread. 

“Freak was the worst of them all,” Alec said wearily. “I don’t know who came up with the name, but they couldn’t have been more right about him. I remember everything about him. He’s the only one I ever met.”

Magnus licked his dry lips. “Freak? What kind of person is called Freak?” 

“He isn’t a person,” Alec reminded him darkly, before he lapsed into silence. Magnus waited.

“Big,” Alec said eventually, his voice echoing strangely around the room. His eyes were distant, locked in a past that only he had a key to. “Freak was big and sort of blocky, like he was made of only muscle, but none of it had grown properly. He was deformed – his chin grew out of his forehead like a tumour and his elbows were up around his ears. His skin was the colour of the shadows under my bed, but he didn’t fit under there.” 

Something changed in Alec’s voice. “Mother always promised me that he would never fit under my bed, and so I shouldn’t be scared of him, but she wasn’t thinking clearly. She had missed something. There are other places to hide. We checked under things and behind things, but I never thought to look up until I was lying down, ready to sleep.” 

Magnus’s forehead creased in confusion. “How could he be ‘up’?”

Alec swallowed audibly. “His fingers were all backwards, bent like hooks. I looked up one night, after mother and dad had gone to bed, and I saw him there. He was clinging to my ceiling, hanging there like something out of a nightmare. I tried to close my eyes, but I couldn’t.”

Magnus’s heart broke a little. 

“You know that saying, ‘If you can’t see it, then it can’t see you’?” Alec asked. Magnus shook his head, but Alec wasn’t looking at him. “I thought that if I couldn’t see him, then he wouldn’t be able to hurt me. But I couldn’t shut my eyes. Once you look into his eyes, you can’t look away until the sun comes up and the night is over. I can still see the whites of his eyes, even now. It’s like they’re burned into my brain.” 

Magnus swallowed back his horror. He could picture Alec easily, a small boy with a tooth missing and pyjamas that were too long around the ankle, lying stock still in bed with his wide eyes locked onto this creature, this monstrosity, from night until morning. Hours of fear, of not being able to scream or close your eyes, to hide in the darkness. 

Alec’s hand went to his pocket, and Magnus heard the sound of paper crumpling beneath trembling fingers. 

“I know things,” Magnus said quietly. He knew that Alec didn’t want to talk about the monsters anymore. “I know things that I shouldn’t. About places in the world that are overloaded with power, the kind that you could easily get a hold of, if you knew how. I know that my house burned down, but I don’t remember it happening. I could smell smoke for months, in my grave, even though I couldn’t breathe.”

Alec watched him carefully, but didn’t interrupt him. He must have sensed that Magnus had to say this. He had to get it off his chest before his ribs cracked under the pressure.

“Sometimes, I remember things, but I don’t think they’re my memories,” Magnus said, his confusion bleeding out into his voice. “I remember old things, from before the wars and bombs and battles. When I sleep, I dream about a world, but I don’t think it’s this one. I think it’s another world.”

“What kind of world?” 

Towers upon towers of white stone. Magnus gave a wistful sigh. “A sweeter one. I miss it.” 

The words were not his own. The voice that crawled out of his mouth wasn’t his own. His jaw unhinged a little, and Magnus let his mouth drop open in surprise and met Alec’s eyes with his own. 

“I didn’t mean to say that,” he said quietly, and Alec nodded, thoughtful. 

“I told you I believed you, and I meant it,” Alec said. “We can figure this out, Magnus. I promise you. I have…” he hesitated. “I have secrets too. Not just about the monsters.” 

“About what?” 

Alec watched him, eyes skating all over his face in a way that left Magnus feeling oddly self-conscious. He seemed to find whatever he was looking for, because he steeled himself, and took a deep breath. 

“About the body. The one we buried. It was mine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ....Sorry for the cliffhanger. It had to be done! And now we know who was buried! Please leave a comment/kudos if you liked this chapter, I'd love to hear from you. And come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr. Thank you!


	13. The Boy in the Bed and Breakfast III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I was leaving that part out for the sake of our dignity.” 
> 
> “What dignity?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahh, it's been a little while, I've been so busy! Halloween and Stranger Things (if anyone wants to yell with me about that show, please do) and now I'm back. Thank you so much for the hilariously shocked response to the last chapter, it was brilliant. Sorry for the cliffhanger, but there isn't one this time, thankfully. Hope you enjoy this chapter. Thank you!

_It was mine._

The words seemed to reverberate around the room, bouncing off the walls and the floor and the ceiling. 

At first, Magnus thought Alec was making fun of him. He was seconds away from getting angry, when he noticed the nervous, unsure expression on Alec’s face. He looked deeply serious, very grave, and so, so sure that Magnus was about to explode, or laugh in his face. 

“I’m not making it up,” Alec rushed to say. “It was my body. I died, and I was… I suppose you could say I was reborn, in a sense, into a new body. This body.”

It was as if a switch had flipped, and suddenly Magnus believed. He believed it in the way one believed in stars and souls, in things bigger than you could ever be, but still there. An odd kind of reverence settled over him.

“Incredible,” Magnus breathed. “Where did this body come from, the one you have now?”

Alec spread his hands. “I don’t know. I don't know anything about it, or what I am, or why I can do what I can do.” 

“How many bodies have you had?” asked Magnus, his mind buzzing with shock and excitement. 

“Three, if you count the one I was born with, as a baby,” Alec said. “I didn’t know I could do it until I was a teenager, and even then, we kept it a secret.” 

“What happens to the bodies you leave behind? The old ones?” 

Alec shrugged. “The first time it happened, the body disappeared almost instantly. The second time, the body stayed where it was, and we had to bury it, in your grave. I imagine it’s gone by now.”

Magnus pondered that for a moment, thinking only of his grave, once again empty, waiting for him, and then he said, with the greatest delicacy. “What’s it like, coming back?”

“There’s this pause in between dying and coming back to life, where I’m not aware of anything except darkness, like standing with your eyes closed in the middle of the night. Thick darkness, the kind that you can’t penetrate. I died, and I’d go to sleep. When I woke up, I was in a new body.” 

Magnus frowned, lifted the cushion out of his lap and twirled it in his hands, incapable even now of keeping still. “That doesn’t make any sense. If you never saw the bodies disappear, or even saw them when you weren’t inside them, how do you know that you’re in a new one? How can you tell?” 

“Easily,” was Alec’s reply. “You know what it’s like to die, Magnus. That’s not something you can mistake for something else. I felt myself die, each time. And there’s something about my body afterwards, about the new ones. The skin is all red and sensitive, and I never have any of the scars I had when I died. It’s like everything’s completely new.”

Alec held one hand up, pointed to the meaty part of his palm. “I had a scar along here, where I cut my hand on a nail in the garden. And on my knee, too, when I fell off a wall at school. They weren’t small scars, either, but they’re not there now.” 

“That’s fascinating,” Magnus murmured, eyes fixed on Alec’s hand. The other boy lowered it slowly, his eyes wary. 

“You’ve got this look in your eye,” Alec said uncertainly. “You look like Simon did when he found out, like you’re about to make me lick a thousand petri-dishes in the name of science.” 

“It would be in the name of science,” Magnus said absently. Then he glanced up sharply. “Simon knows about this? He believes you?” 

Alec hesitated, and then nodded jerkily. At Magnus’s crestfallen expression, he hastened to add, “Not at first, though. Jace was the first one to know. He’s the one who confirmed it, because he saw the body I left behind disappear, the first time.” 

“I almost didn’t,” said Jace, closing the door behind him as he slid into the room. There was mud on his cheek and he looked tousled, as though he had been fighting, but something in his face warned against asking questions, so Magnus kept silent. Jace crossed the room, clapped Alec on the shoulder and then sprawled on the bed, one leg bent at the knee as he stared at the ceiling. He didn’t look at Magnus. 

“I think you can be forgiven, given the circumstances,” Alec said quietly. He glanced up at Magnus’s curious expression and smiled. “We were thirteen, I think. Thirteen?” 

Jace nodded, hummed an affirmative. “Thirteen. You had that ugly bowl hair-cut back then, remember? Maryse went mental when I told her. She’s got a thing about your hair.” 

“You can hardly blame her. I do have luscious locks,” said Alec seriously. 

Jace snorted. “We were cycling that day, because it was winter, and for once the sun had deigned to come out, and we thought we might as well make the most of it. There’s this park in the middle of where we lived, big sprawling thing with a bank full of trees. We decided, in all our glorious wisdom, to cycle down it, because we were idiotic morons.” 

“Teenagers,” Alec corrected him. “We were teenagers.” 

Jace waved a hand dismissively. “Teenagers, morons, po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe. Same difference. Anyway, our little attempt at extreme sports didn’t go exactly as planned. We were only halfway down when Alec hit a tree root, went flying over the handlebars and smashed into this big boulder.” 

Alec grimaced, his hand drifting up to the back of his head. “I don’t remember much, although that’s hardly surprising. I remember feeling like I was flying, for a split second, and then there was this crunching feeling and a hell of a lot of pain. Everything went black, then. It was like I told you; thick darkness, and I was so still and silent. I couldn’t move, hell, I wasn’t aware of wanting to move.” 

“I didn’t see it happen,” Jace said flatly. “I saw the bike, though. It flew ahead of me and smashed into a tree, and I tried to turn around so quickly that I fell off my bike, landed badly and broke my wrist. When I got to Alec, he was…” 

“Dead,” Alec said succinctly, with a short nod of his head.

“There was so much blood.” 

Magnus rubbed his hands along his jeans; he didn’t like the way Jace’s voice had gone hollow and flat, all the emotion stripped away. It made him nervous. Alec looked fleetingly guilty at Jace’s words, 

“Just a whole forest, stained red,” Jace said quietly. “That’s what it felt like, anyway. I tried to do CPR but I only had the one hand and I could already tell that he was gone. I was panicking, though. And I knew I needed to get help if I wanted someone to save him, but I didn’t want to leave him there. I’d seen horror films where people died in the woods, and the birds picked them apart after only a few minutes.” 

Alec made a noise of protest in his throat. “Can we maybe not think about that? Please?” 

Jace snorted again, kicked Alec’s shoulder lightly from his position on the bed. “Yeah, well. I stayed there for a good ten minutes, trying to decide what to do, and then I came up with a fantastic plan. Truly fantastic. Leave my best friend in the woods and go home like everything was fine. Zombie, don’t you think that’s a genius plan?”

Magnus startled a little, and then twisted his fingers together whilst Alec rolled his eyes in exasperation. 

“You were probably in shock,” Magnus offered. “And in pain. It does strange things to your mind.”

“That’s what I said,” Alec muttered. 

Jace didn’t pay them any attention. “I was halfway up the hill, halfway through my fantastic plan, when I heard this noise and turned around again. And then it was weird, like this blurred double vision kind of thing. It looked like I was seeing two Alec’s, which was a crime in and of itself considering his appalling haircut had now doubled, and then the slightly fuzzier Alec became clear and solid and started to cough.”

“And then there was only one of me,” Alec finished. “Lying beside where the old Alec was, with no blood on me, not even a scratch.” 

“He was all wobbly for an hour afterwards,” Jace said fondly. “Like a baby deer.” 

Alec reached out and punched his shoulder. “Simon found out later, of course, after we became friends. He didn’t believe it at first, and then he saw it with his own eyes, recently, and he couldn’t really deny it anymore.” 

“Yes, he could,” Jace said, in a tone that suggested he was rolling his eyes so hard that they had hit the back of his skull. “But I punched him a couple of times, he punched me back, there was a round of very masculine sobbing, and then he couldn’t deny it anymore.” 

“I was leaving that part out for the sake of our dignity.” 

“What dignity?” 

Magnus smiled as they bickered, even as something wilted in his chest. Simon had to see things with his own two eyes to believe them, that much was certain. It was understandable, but at the same time it hurt, because Magnus didn’t know how to prove to anyone that he had been buried alive for years. It wasn’t something that came with evidence, not something that had been documented. 

But Jace had come back, even if he hadn’t said anything about leaving, or about Magnus’s story, and so there was a great possibility that Simon would come back too. He just had to be patient. 

“So, that was the first time,” Magnus said. “What about the second time?” 

Alec looked at him gravely. “The second time, one of the things chasing us caught up to us. Jace was there. Simon didn’t see it happen, or who did it, but he saw the aftermath. He saw my body melt into two, and he saw me come back to life.” 

“What happened?” 

“It was my fault,” Jace said, with a voice like steel. Nobody spoke for a moment afterwards, although Alec strongly looked like he wanted to argue, and Magnus decided that there had been enough questions for one day. 

“I’m tired,” he said, and Alec looked relieved. “Thank you, though. For listening. For believing me. And for answering my questions.”

“No problem,” Alec said softly. “You can take the second bed, if you like.”

Magnus shook his head. After so long in a grave, a bed felt like the strangest sort of comfort. It was too soft, too yielding to his form, like floating. He craved a harshness under his back and the scent of damp earth, but he would settle for the floor. 

“I’m fine down here.” 

“Well, I’m not,” Jace said, flopping back against the bed. “Simon can sleep on the roof, for all I care.” 

He punched a pillow to get comfortable, wriggled around a bit, and then dropped off to sleep almost immediately. Magnus watched him incredulously, and then his gaze flickered to Alec, who was staring at him with… with fondness. 

“I feel as though that defies all of the laws in the universe,” Magnus said, indicating Jace with a flutter of his hand. 

Alec laughed quietly, and Magnus felt his pulse stop. It was such a heart-breaking noise, because Alec was made for laughter, and you could see it in his face and his eyes, but he barely ever smiled, barely ever showed joy. Magnus knew something had happened, something recent, to make him this way, but he couldn’t for the life of him find the courage to ask. Something told him that would be too intrusive, too painful. 

“You should do that more often,” Magnus said. 

“Do what?” 

“Laugh,” Magnus said. “It’s a beautiful sound.” 

He didn’t know what he said wrong, but Alec’s face burned red, and his mouth dropped open. He stared at Magnus for a moment, before spluttering something inaudible and turning around rigidly, lying flat on his back on the other bed. Magnus lay back against the bed, turning over his words, but he couldn’t find anything wrong with them. Eventually, his eyes grew too heavy, and he let them drift shut. And he began to dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please leave a comment if you liked it, let me know what you thought. Also, I've been looking for some kind of discord chat/server to talk about Shadowhunters on, but I can't find anything. Any of you know of one? Thank you so much! And come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr :)


	14. The Boy in the Park

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Magnus actually laughed, and it was such a warm, soft sound that it startled Jace, who had never heard him laugh before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm posting this much later than usual asdfghjkl
> 
> Also, when it comes to the Lightwood family stuff, TRUST ME. Just trust me. Seriously. All will be revealed. Really hope you like this chapter! Things are moving along, and the next one is interesting, to say the least. 
> 
> Thank you!

Monday took a long time to arrive. 

Jace usually revelled in awkwardness. He liked to poke at situations with sticks until they exploded in his face, but he genuinely wished that Sunday would fade into non-existence. Alec spent it alternating between peering anxiously through the blinds at the barren street below and curling up to sleep on the corner of the bed. Simon spent it stiffly, sitting on the bed and combing through the textbook he had brought along. Magnus didn’t have anything to take his mind off the tense silence, so Jace took him to the pub down the road and taught him how to play pool. 

Magnus was brilliant at pool. Jace wasn’t bad, but Magnus made him look like he’d just picked up a cue that day for the first time, when in reality Jace had actually liked to look cool in the college break room. Faced with unimaginable prowess, Jace dropped the cue like it was on fire, sent balls spinning off the table and onto the floor, and even left a large dent in the soft green felt that they strategically covered up with one of the balls when they left. 

“I don’t want to go back yet,” Magnus said, when Jace pulled him out of the door close to dinnertime. 

“Well, tough,” Jace said. “You’re making me look bad, I’m hungry, and there’s only so much I can take before I snap and stab you with a cue. That’s a joke, by the way, but I really am hungry, so let’s go.”

“I don’t think I should stay with you three anymore,” Magnus blurted out. 

Jace stopped in the middle of the street. There were only a few people walking by, but Jace pulled him aside anyway, into the alley beside the pub. Three men were smoking nearby, beers clutched in their hands as they laughed raucously. Jace scowled at them. 

“Come on,” he muttered. “There’s a park over here.”

Flowers and trees lined the large stretch of damp grass that made up the park. Jace steered them away from a bandstand full of teenagers and towards a pond at the end, near the exit gate. He stooped and picked up a handful of stones and poured some into Magnus’s hand. Magnus looked from the stones to Jace in bewilderment. 

“That wasn’t quite the reaction I was expecting.” 

Jace rolled his eyes. “Try and skip them.”

“Skip them?” 

Jace stole some back and studied the pond. It wasn’t really big enough, but they were alone, with no chance of anyone hearing their conversation, and that was all Jace wanted. He threw the stone and it fell with a plop just a few feet from him. 

“It’s supposed to jump across the water,” Jace explained, grimacing. “Look, you were the one who didn’t want to go back yet. You want to tell me why you’re thinking of leaving?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

Jace spread his hands. “Would I be asking if it was? Throw a stone.”

Magnus shot him a doubtful look and threw the stone. It landed at his feet, in the wet grass, and he looked down at it mournfully whilst Jace snorted with laughter. 

“Simon thinks I’m a liar,” Magnus said quietly. 

“Simon thinks you’re disturbed,” Jace corrected. 

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Yes,” Jace said firmly. “He doesn’t think you’re lying to him. He thinks your brain is lying to you, and this is all a product of what happened to you. He’s not mad at you, he’s mad at the situation. And Simon’s opinion isn’t the be-all and end-all, by the way. If you’re going to leave, it should be because of a better reason than that.”

Jace threw a flatter stone, and it bounced once before sinking beneath the water. They both stared at the ripples that slid across the surface, disturbing a cluster of lily-pads. 

“It doesn’t matter to me that he’s mad at me,” Magnus said. “It matters that he doesn’t believe me. When people don’t believe, they don’t listen, and when they don’t listen, they put themselves in danger. I will not be responsible for putting the three of you in danger.” 

“You really died, then?” Jace said. Magnus jerked his head up slightly to look at him, his expression cautious. He nodded hesitantly, and Jace nodded back. “Thought so. I believe you, you know. About being in the ground for so long. There’s just something a bit unnerving about you.” 

He grimaced when Magnus ducked his head. 

“Not that that’s a bad thing,” Jace added. “It means you’re different, that’s all.”

Magnus stared off into the distance for a while before he said, “I don’t want to be different.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” Jace said, with fake cheer. “You’re different, and there’s nothing bad about that. I like you this way. So, does Alec, and Simon. Now you just have to learn to like you this way too.”

“I don’t want to be different,” Magnus said again. “I want to be human.” 

Jace sighed. He’d had this conversation with Alec before, in the dead of night, when they were younger, although they made a habit not to speak of it most days. They didn’t want anyone finding out what had happened that day in the park. It had been pretty obvious that nobody would believe them. 

“Alec said the same thing, and I’ll tell you what I told him,” Jace said. “Do you feel human?”

Magnus looked at him in surprise. “What?” 

“I know you have all this extra stuff going on, and that makes it confusing, but do you feel human? Because humanity is more than just looking the part. It’s the way you act and the things you feel, and doing what’s right rather than what’s easy, and sometimes, it’s about making mistakes and fucking up.” 

Magnus’ mouth twitched. “Are you trying to give me a stirring speech?”

Jace stared at him. “You’re secretly an asshole, aren’t you?” 

Magnus actually laughed, and it was such a warm, soft sound that it startled Jace, who had never heard him laugh before. He resolved to make him do it again, sometime. He had a feeling that Alec would want to hear it, if nothing else. 

“I don’t know what I am,” Magnus reminded him, still teasing. “But I think I understand your point. It’s less about what I am, and more about who I am.” 

“Exactly,” Jace said, rolling his eyes. “Now, come on, I’m still hungry.”

“What about Alec?” Magnus asked, as they walked. 

“What about him?” 

“Why doesn’t he think he’s human?” 

Jace pretended to think about it for a moment. “Hmm, let’s think. Could it be because he can die and come back to life? No, that couldn’t possibly be it.”

“Alright,” Magnus said quietly, taking no notice of his sarcasm. “What convinced him that he was human?” 

“Nothing,” Jace said. “We’ve talked about it before, but we never came up with anything. Eventually, we decided to just let it be. I think that’s partly why he’s so eager to see this Professor Arnold, even if he won’t admit it. He wants answers. Or he thinks he does.” 

Jace didn’t need to be a mind-reader to know what Magnus was thinking. That makes two of us. 

They spent the rest of Sunday sleeping and avoiding the awkwardness that still lingered from the previous day. Jace kept an eye on Simon, who had worked out most of his frustrations yesterday, when Jace followed him out of a hotel. They hadn’t gone far, just out to the alleyway, where Simon could pin him against the wall and shout and yell, throw a few punches that never hit their mark, frustrated beyond belief. Jace could understand that frustration. He felt it every time they got back into the car, every time they found some new piece of the puzzle that didn’t quite fit right, every time he spotted Alec with grief written all over his face. He had pushed his own grief down, where he could ignore it, and all that was left was frustration and anger and fear. 

So, he could understand Simon. He kept an eye on him, watched him frown at his phone or glance at Magnus out of the corner of his eye, much the same way Alec was doing, although Jace guessed it was for entirely different reasons. He slept some, educated Magnus on the finer points of classical music, and when morning came, they all piled into the car and drove a few miles to the college where Professor Arnold worked. 

It looked like a school and felt like a school, and Jace instantly curled his lip. He had gone to college, at Maryse’s insistence, but he hadn’t enjoyed it. He liked learning, especially music and literature and drama, but the rest of it had been a bore, and the subjects never covered what he wanted to study. There was no freedom, no true exposure to the world, and being back in a small, overly-lit corridor made him think of all the reasons why he was so grateful that he had been home-schooled in the beginning, even if it was only for a short time. 

Alec chatted quietly to the receptionist at the desk, a young man with a bad case of acne, fresh out of school, while Magnus observed everything with wide eyes. Jace watched him in amusement, and then tugged him along down the corridor when Alec beckoned them forward. 

“He said it should be just up here,” Alec said, jerking his head at the stairs. He was jittery with nerves, but Jace knew he was the only one who could tell. He knew Alec like the back of his hand, which is why he shouldn’t have trusted him to lead them through the maze of corridors. They ended up near another staircase, standing beside a janitor’s closet. 

“Are you sure this is the right way?” Magnus asked, quirking an eyebrow. 

Alec grimaced, glancing around. Jace rolled his eyes and snagged a passing woman by the elbow, jerking back as she swung her backpack at him. 

“Don’t go around grabbing young ladies,” she snapped. “It’s not polite.”

Simon snickered into his palm whilst Jace arched an eyebrow at her. 

“We’re lost,” he said flatly. “Could you help us?” He glanced down at her nametag, which read Lucy, and she bristled. 

“My eyes are up here,” she hissed, and Simon lost it in the background, doubling over as he pretended to cough. 

“We really are lost,” Magnus said, stepping smoothly in front of Jace with a charming smile in place. Jace gaped at the back of his head. “Don’t mind him, he didn’t mean anything by it. You look like you could help us.” 

Lucy softened, her eyes smiling as she looked Magnus up and down. “Where are you trying to find?”

“We’re looking for a Professor Arnold,” Magnus explained. “She’s supposed to be an expert in Folklore.” 

Lucy rolled her eyes. “Oh, you’re talking about Agatha, aren’t you? She’s on the second floor, Office Thirty. It’s the last door on the left. Don’t bother knocking, she’s definitely alone in there, and there’s nothing she likes better than someone to show off to. And it’s not like she’s got anything else to do with her day.”

She turned on her heel and stalked away down the hall, her shoes clicking smartly against the wooden floor. Jace watched her go until Magnus tugged on his sleeve. 

“Charming girl,” he muttered, and Magnus hid a grin. 

Simon and Alec had already moved down the corridor and were examining the buttons for the elevator. Alec had his hand in his pocket again, clutching the note that Jace knew was hidden there. 

“He has a bit of paper that he holds when he’s nervous,” Magnus said. “Is that the note he spoke of?"

Jace watched him for a moment. Magnus was a careful person who didn’t talk much, and the thing about not talking was that you got really good at listening, even when someone wasn’t using their words. Perhaps especially when someone wasn’t using their words. Magnus wasn’t unnoticeable, but he had a particular talent for blending in when he wanted to that made it easier for him to observe, to listen. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it was, in this case, a dangerous thing. 

“Do me a favour, yeah?” He kept his voice low. “Don’t mention the note, or what you just said, in front of Alec. It’s not something that needs to be brought up, you understand?”

“So, it isn’t the same note?” 

“I said to leave it alone,” Jace snapped. 

Something bitter twisted Magnus’s expression for a brief moment, and then Jace blinked, and it was gone, replaced with a blank mask. Jace wondered how much of Magnus’s placid, plain exterior was manufactured and how much of it really was the expressions of a confused, lost boy. He felt bad immediately, but he didn’t let it show. 

“Very well,” Magnus said, and his voice was cold enough that Jace winced. 

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Jace said, sighing. “It’s just a sensitive subject, alright? Maryse didn’t exactly leave it for him in the best of circumstances. Look, I’m pretty sure you’ll find out everything once we meet her, okay? So just, don’t mention it until then.” 

Agatha Arnold was a beautiful black woman with hair that fell to her waist. She wore a soft paisley-patterned blue dress and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, and she smiled when stepped forward to shake Alec’s hand, revealing a small, stylish gap between her front two teeth. 

“Caleb Victor?” 

“Actually, no,” Alec said, gripping her hand firmly. “I promise, I wouldn’t have used a fake name if it weren’t absolutely necessary. This is Simon, Jace and Magnus, and my name is Alec Lightwood.”

Agatha, who had begun to look alarmed at Alec’s confession, frowned suddenly. “Lightwood? As in Maryse Lightwood?”

“She was my mother,” Alec said. “I’m sorry for the deception, but as I said, it was necessary. I don’t want anyone to know I’m here, and we had to sign in at the front desk.”

“I know, it’s a precaution,” Agatha said. “A safety measure, I suppose you could call it.” There was a tense silence, and then Agatha sighed and sat down behind her desk, fiddling with her glasses. “Please, have a seat. I don’t have enough for all of you, but make yourself comfortable. What can I do for you? I assume you did all of this for a reason beyond teenage rebellion.”

“You don’t look that much older than us,” Jace said. 

Agatha flashed him a smile. “I skipped several grades when it became clear that I was a genius with a photographic memory and an abnormally high IQ. They don’t usually hire professors this young, but I teach a small, select class of students, and I have all the correct qualifications.”

Jace couldn’t tell if she was showing off or simply stating facts, but he was impressed either way. Alec sat on the only available seat, and Simon and Magnus lined up against the back wall. Jace stepped away from the door; he didn’t want her to think they were blocking her in. 

“What was it that brought you here?” Agatha asked. “It must be pretty serious, if you had to hide your identity.” 

“It’s about my mother,” Alec said quietly. “She’s disappeared, and she left something behind for me. Before she vanished, she left behind some notes, and one of them mentioned you. The only problem is, the longer one is in a different language, and I can’t read it. I’m hoping you can help me translate it, so that I can find her.” 

Agatha looked pensive. “She’s missing?”

“Yes.” 

“It’s strange,” Agatha said. “I didn’t spend a long time getting to know your mother, but she never seemed like the type to run out on family. Something must have happened, for her to have left you alone. Or not alone, as it were. You have a father and a sister, don’t you?”

“I did.” Alec’s voice cracked with grief.

Jace flinched. The grief he had been supressing welled up inside of him as he thought of Max, of Izzy. He wanted nothing more than to go to Alec, but he knew he wouldn’t appreciate it, especially not in front of the others. “I had a younger sister, and a younger brother.” 

“Had?” Agatha said softly. 

Alec bowed his head, and the silence stretched to the point of breaking until Jace cleared his throat and stepped forward, hands shoved in his pockets. He could feel Magnus watching them both, taking it all in. 

“We aren’t here to talk about that,” Jace said. “We just need you to translate these few pages, alright?” 

“I don’t speak any other languages,” Agatha said plainly. “I could, if I wanted to, but I’ve always found other things far more fascinating that linguistics. I’m a Professor of Folklore and Mythology, of history. If you wanted someone who could speak a different language, you should have gone to a different expert.” 

Simon made a small noise and stalked forward, digging a pile of papers out of the ridiculous shoulder bag he always carried. He slapped them down on the desk and shot Alec a firm look before retreating to stand beside Magnus, who was watching the proceedings with a mixture of caution and unbridled curiosity. 

“I just told you—”

“It’s not in any language we know,” Alec interrupted. “Simon researched it until he was blue in the face, and there’s no known language that matches any of these words.” He jabbed a finger at the papers, which Agatha cautiously picked up. “I remember my mother used to talk of you fondly. She didn’t talk of anyone fondly, so that was a big clue. She also used to talk about the kind of ideas you both had, about different worlds, different realms to this one.”

Over in the corner, Magnus jolted. He took a half-step forward, and then froze when Simon shot him a look. But Jace was curious, now, curious about the slightly desperate look on Magnus’s face, and he kept his eyes on the boy as Alec continued to speak. 

“It’s possible that there are other worlds to this one, other realms intertwined with our own,” Agatha allowed. “It’s not a concept I’ve visited in a while, since it doesn’t exactly get you a lot of traction in the academic world. I already get enough grief for teaching fairy-tales without adding in that I actually believe in magic.” 

“My mother must have thought that something you believed in was worth something,” Alec said. “Your name is right there, along with your hometown, in amongst all these words that I don’t understand. If these words can help, if there’s even the faintest chance that I can find her, then I’m going to do everything in my power to ensure that I do. Please, just look at the language.” 

Agatha regarded him silently. And then she looked, and then she looked again, and then she jerked back as though she’d been hit. 

“It’s like I can see two languages,” she said, a little shakily. “One is in this strange, foreign tongue, and the other is in English, superimposed over the top of each other. It’s – it’s weird. The letters keep moving.”

She put the papers down on the desk with trembling fingers, but she couldn’t stop glancing at them. They were slightly yellowed with age and dripping with dried ink, both handwritten and printed, clearly ripped from an old book and scribbled on. 

“This isn’t possible,” Agatha muttered. 

“It’s not a trick,” Alec promised her. “It’s as real as anything. And we need your help. I have to find my mother. I have to know if she’s alright, if she’s alive, and this is my only clue.”

Agatha fiddled with a paperweight on her desk, her hands fluttering nervously. “This all seems far bigger than just you. A missing person isn’t something to undertake alone. Are you sure you shouldn’t involve the police?”

“The police won’t believe me,” Alec said desperately. “Please.”

Agatha took a deep breath, and then nodded shortly. “Alright. I’ll help. You need these translated, and I can help with that, but first I have a class to teach. If I could help you right away then I would, but this is still my job. Give me an hour or so, and then meet me at this address.” 

She scribbled something on a notepad and then ripped the page out and gave it to Alec, who took it gratefully, his fingers clinging tightly to the lined paper. He moved to pick up the papers as well, folding them carefully in half and handing them to Simon, who put them back in his bag. 

“Thank you,” Jace said firmly, and he meant it. 

“Don’t thank me yet,” Agatha warned him, shooing them out the door. “You may not like what the words say.”

In a few minutes they were back outside, blinking in the bright sunlight. Alec looked a little stunned, still gripping the address like a lifeline. Magnus drew close to him, almost automatically, like he didn’t want Alec to face his feelings alone. Jace didn’t think they realised how much they gravitated towards each other, like magnets, each with their own pull. 

“We should go back and get our things,” Jace said. “We left most of it at the hotel, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be caught out without a sleeping bag if we have to move again in a hurry.”

“We could go back to that café afterwards,” Simon suggested. “Just while we wait.”

“Any particular reason why?” 

“They have pretty good coffee.” 

Jace rolled his eyes, but Alec just shrugged. 

“They also had good pancakes.”

“I liked the muffins,” Magnus added, and Jace threw his hands up and stalked towards the car. He heard Magnus laugh softly, and when he glanced back, Alec was staring at Magnus, entranced, as though the sound had stolen all the breath from his body. He felt a twinge of fear as he watched them smile at each other. 

It wasn’t anything as juvenile as a fear of losing Alec. They had each other, and they would always have each other, no matter what happened. That was simply a fact. No, Jace’s fear wasn’t for himself, it was for Alec. Alec, who wore his heart on his sleeve, who had never had the cause or the experience to know to keep it safe and secure, who gave it out freely to those who wanted it. As far as Jace knew, Alec had never been in love before, but Jace had the funny feeling that he was watching it happen, for the first time. 

“Are you alright?” Simon asked, coming up beside him. He had taken his glasses off and was polishing them on his ridiculously nerdy t-shirt, squinting carefully so that he could see where he was going. Jace slowed down to walk with him, and shrugged. 

“Everything’s so weird at the moment,” Jace said. “People dying, people chasing us, people coming back to life.”

Simon stiffened, and Jace sighed. 

“You believed it with Alec,” Jace said, nudging him slightly with his elbow. “Try and believe it with Magnus." 

“It’s too much,” Simon said, a note of desperation in his voice. “It’s just one more thing on top of everything for us to deal with.” 

“No,” Jace said firmly, glancing back to make sure Magnus wasn’t listening. “He’s not something to deal with. He’s not a problem, or an obstacle, or a bullet point on a check-list. He’s a person with a messed-up past, and we don’t have to deal with any of it. We just have to be there.”

Simon studied him carefully for a second. His hand hovered nearby, like he wanted to reach out, but couldn’t bring himself to. Then he quirked a wry smile, and said, “Never thought I’d see the day when you were lecturing me on basic human decency.”

Jace rolled his eyes. He reached out and plucked Simon’s glasses from his hands, ignoring his protests as he carefully inched them onto Simon’s nose. It shut Simon up for a blessed few minutes, and then he huffed, a red tinge to his cheeks as he trudged towards the car and threw open the passenger’s door. 

Jace grinned smugly to himself and counted it as a victory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahh thank you! Please leave a comment/kudos if you enjoyed it, and come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr. Thank you so much!


	15. The Boy in the Cafe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon hesitated. Magnus could see everything in his eyes, all his fears and all his worries and the horrors he’d been through. He could see the aching longing he had for all of this to just be over already. It made his heart, which already felt like an aged, beaten thing, give a compassionate squeeze.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't be fooled by the ending, people are not who they appear to be, especially 'little sisters'. 
> 
> Thank you so much for the brilliant response on the last chapter, I absolutely love hearing your theories and such by the way, please leave as many as you like. Hope you enjoy this chapter, sorry it's up a bit later than usual!

They settled around the same table they had sat in before, and began passing around the papers. Jace ordered several cups of coffee, which arrived swiftly, and Magnus picked idly at a muffin whilst he watched the other three bicker. He still felt that deep, gnawing hunger in his stomach, but it was drowned out by a throbbing pain in his shoulder, where he had caught the yellowing bruise on the way into the shop. Pain had a way of obscuring everything else. 

The papers were passed to Magnus, who took them absent-mindedly, leafing through them before he spotted something strange. He put the muffin down and pulled the papers close, examining each word in confusion. 

Magnus frowned. “Where are the papers? The ones you asked Agatha to translate?”

Jace gave him a blank, slightly amused stare. “Did you hit your head again? They’re right there in your hands.” 

Magnus’s frown deepened. “But these are in English. Look, see, ‘and deep in the woods there was a sound like silence, if silence could be described like glass shattering, like the crack of ice breaking beneath young feet.’” 

A stunned silence followed, and then everyone began to babble at once. 

“You can read that?”

“That’s impossible, that just can’t be possible—”

“Brilliant, man, why didn’t you tell us before, we could have saved ourselves this whole trip if we’d known you could read it!”

“You can read that?”

“He’s making it up.”

Magnus looked up at that. “I’m not making it up,” he said quietly, hurt. 

Simon chewed on his lip, dubious. “Why would you be able to read that? It’s gibberish. Are you telling me that out of all the people in the world we could have stumbled across, we happened to find the one person who could read – you know what? Forget it. What does it all say?” 

But Magnus had had enough of being doubted. He pushed the papers away, ignoring Alec’s concerned look, and made his way through the café, towards the door at the back of the room. 

Simon followed him into the bathroom. It was a small room, with two toilets and a row of sinks that looked as though they had seen better days. Magnus tried not to think about how sticky the floor was. He started washing his hands instead, letting the cold rush of water ground him. 

“Why did you follow me?” Magnus asked quietly. 

“I’m worried about you,” Simon said, a little hesitant. “The things you’ve been saying, about death and monsters and graves… Well, you have to admit that it’s odd, Magnus. Have you hit your head again? Are you feeling okay?”

“No, I’m not okay,” Magnus said, drying his hands. “That doesn’t mean I’m not right, either. I meant what I said, Simon. I’m not real, not the way you are. I’m like a ghost of something I was.” 

Simon scoffed. “Bullshit. Next you’re going to tell me that I should stay away from you, that you’re dangerous.”

Magnus simply looked at him. 

“Magnus,” Simon said. “Stop being stupid. You’re just a normal man.”

“There’s nothing normal about me,” Magnus said stubbornly. “I died. And I’m dangerous.”

“Is that so? What are you going to do? What do ghosts do?” Simon asked, obviously humouring him. “Eat people? Scare children? Swallow up good dreams? Wait, let me guess, they feast on innocence, don’t they?”

Magnus lifted his chin.

Simon’s mocking grin slid from his face. “You genuinely believe that, don’t you? You believe in ghosts and nightmares and dead things and monsters.”

“I was a dead thing,” Magnus shot back. “You helped to pull me out of a grave that I had been in for years. Do you seriously think I was alive in there? Do you honestly believe that I could have been under all that earth, lucid and awake, without going mad? I was a dead thing, and then the three of you brought me back to life.”

Simon swallowed thickly; Magnus watched the prominent bulge in his throat become less so, watched the doubt creep into his eyes. “Coincidence. You were only in there for a few minutes, and we happened to dig in the right place. It was a coincidence, Magnus, that’s all! There’s no such thing as magic or monsters, and there’s no such thing as ghosts. You weren’t dead.”

Magnus threw his arms up in the air and began to pace, exasperated, but Simon kept talking, steamrollering over him. 

“You were never dead, Magnus,” he insisted. “It’s the trauma, it’s changed how you see what happened to you. You wouldn’t be here if you were dead. It’s just not possible. Scientifically, there’s no possible way –”

Magnus cut him off. “What about Alec? He told me what happens to him when he dies. He told me you saw it with your own eyes, so why can you believe him, but not me?”

Simon hesitated. Magnus could see everything in his eyes, all his fears and all his worries and the horrors he’d been through. He could see the aching longing he had for all of this to just be over already. It made his heart, which already felt like an aged, beaten thing, give a compassionate squeeze. 

“I don’t know,” Simon murmured. He sighed harshly, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “It’s – I used to play a lot of video games, and read a lot of comics, and when things like this happened in them, I used to think it was awesome. I used to want to live a life where I was the hero of a story, where I got to charge in and save everyone. But this… this isn’t like that. There’s nothing here I can control, nothing I can do to actually help. We’re all being dragged along by something bigger than us, something we don’t understand, and I’m sorry, but I don’t want to add to that by believing you. You make things even more complicated, even more impossible.” 

Magnus held back a flinch by sheer force of will. He tried to tell himself that it didn’t matter what Simon thought, that it didn’t matter what any of them thought, but the truth was, Magnus only had them. 

No, he thought. That wasn’t quite true. He had them, sure, but he also had himself.

“Do you think that I’m insane?” Magnus asked, his voice remarkably calm considering the anger and impatience that was rushing through him. “Do you think that I’m genuinely mad?”

Simon looked surprised. “No, of course not, but—”

“Do you think that I’m lying?”

Simon looked at him warily. “No. I think that you think you’re telling the truth.”

Magnus dropped his hands. “Then it’s not a matter of worry or fear. You just don’t believe me.” He took a step back, and was surprised when Simon immediately followed him, hands moving to grip his shoulders. He was such an earnest boy, and so young. 

“I want to believe you,” Simon promised him. “But you don’t understand.”

Magnus glanced up quickly. 

“People like you,” Simon said. “People like you and Jace and Alec turn my world upside down. I’m not very good with change, no matter how small, and I like to have answers, Magnus.” 

“You have faith in your religion,” Magnus pointed out. 

“I grew up with that,” Simon said. “It’s my comfort, my home. This is different. There’s nothing comforting about any of this.”

Magnus could appreciate that. He took another small step back, and this time, Simon didn’t follow him. “I don’t make sense. At least admit that. If you’re not going to admit that there might be the slightest chance that I could be right about this, then at least admit that I don’t make sense.” 

Simon smiled weakly. “You’re a coincidence.”

Magnus knew what he was saying. He fluttered a hand through the air, faking a little flair. “Perhaps. If there’s a chance that I could be right, then there’s a chance that you could be right, after all.”

Magnus didn’t believe it, not really. Even the doubt that crept in – maybe he really was just suffering from trauma, maybe the years had been fabricated by Magnus’s desperate mind, maybe the lack of memories was natural, his bodies’ way of protecting him – was quickly overpowered by the sense of being right, deep down. His belief in the unknown was so overwhelming that, for a moment, Magnus could barely breathe. He wondered how Simon could stand it, having this much faith in something. 

Because it was the same, no matter what it was directed at. They both had faith in something bigger than themselves, whether it was the safety and reassurance of an old religion or the make-up of magic. Every single strand was bigger than them, more important than them. 

“I shouldn’t have brought you into this,” Magnus said quietly. “I should have gone to the hospital in the first place, after we left the hotel. I’m sorry.” 

Simon’s hand spasmed, grasping at air as the oxygen fled his lungs. Magnus couldn’t look at him, not properly, not for very long. He felt much smaller than he ever had before, suddenly, and he didn’t know why. All he knew was that his heart was aching, and that he had to get out of here as soon as possible. He had to get away from them. 

Because whether they believed it or not, there was danger out there, and that danger was coming after them, after him. And if Simon didn’t believe in that danger, if he convinced Jace and Alec not to believe either, then none of them would be prepared. They would be vulnerable, easily hurt. 

“You don’t have to apologise,” Simon said, with a note of fake cheer in his voice. His hand hovered near Magnus’s chin, like he wanted to lift it, to make Magnus look at him, and yet each time, his hand drifted away again. “You have nothing to apologise for, do you understand?”

“I saw a police station nearby,” Magnus said quietly, and winced as Simon froze. “All villages have them, I guess. I won’t tell them that you guys found me, or how you found me. I’ll just tell them that I woke up with no memory and, I don’t know, hitchhiked here? I don’t know. I’ll tell them I panicked. Maybe they can take me to a hospital.”

Magnus had no plans to do any such thing, but he wasn’t about to reveal that to Simon. 

“Magnus,” Simon said. 

“I’ll make sure that they don’t hear about you, any of you,” he promised. “I won’t take them to that field, either.”

He knew it wouldn’t make a difference, if the police found the field he had been buried in. The other Alec would have long since disappeared. The grave would be empty.

“Stop,” Simon sputtered. “Stop talking about leaving. You can’t just go, not after all of this – not after everything we’ve been through. Alec would—” 

Magnus turned around. 

“Magnus,” Simon said, voice soft with disbelief. 

Magnus wrenched the door open and walked calmly outside. 

The noise of the café smashed into him with all the weight of a rolling train. He staggered for a second before rallying, ducking past a waitress who cursed when he knocked her tray with his shoulder. He shot a hasty apology over his shoulder and made his way to the booth at the front of the café, where Alec and Jace were sat, heads bent over the collection of leaflets and maps that blanketed their table. 

Jace looked up with a bright smile when Magnus banged his hip against the table, skidding to a stop. “You took ages. We thought you’d fallen in.” 

“Pass me my bag,” Magnus said abruptly. Alec looked up briefly at the tone. Jace frowned, but did as he asked, rummaging around in the empty seat beside him. Magnus snatched the bag out of his grip and stood there for a moment, feeling as though he was suspended in time. His mouth fell open, but no words came out. 

“Magnus, wait,” Simon said irritably, squeezing through a gap in a lingering couple. They both shot him dirty looks before moving to a table in the far corner, muttering about tourists under their breath. Simon didn’t seem to care. He reached for Magnus’s shoulder, but someone else got there first. 

Magnus was wrenched around so hard that his back hit the table, sending Alec’s papers scattering. Some fell to the floor by his feet, and Alec scrambled to pick them up, but Magnus barely noticed. The waitress stood in front of him. Her face was strangely fragile, as though it might shatter any second. She continued to stare blankly at him, her hand fisted in his shirt. 

“What are you doing?” Simon asked, sounding confused. “Look, we’re kind of busy here, and he apologised for knocking into you, so if you don’t mind…”

“Magnus?” the waitress asked, in a trembling voice. They all froze. Simon’s hand arrested in mid-air. The waitress kept staring, expectant, as though she was waiting for Magnus to notice her, to recognise her. “It is you, isn’t it? Magnus. Oh God, Magnus.”

Her expression crumpled, tears streaming freely down her face in rivulets, and she threw herself at Magnus and sobbed into his shoulder. Magnus simply stood there, his face a mask of shock, as a complete stranger hugged him tightly as though he might fade away at any moment. 

Gently, he pushed her away. She refused to go far, hovering close by as she wiped her tears on her apron, smearing mascara across her cheeks. Magnus could feel the curious eyes of everyone in the café fixed on them. He lowered his voice before he said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t know who you are.”

A hiccup, and then she laughed wetly. “Magnus, don’t joke about that…” She trailed off as she caught his eye and saw the truth written there. Her eyes widened in incredulity and then her face became heavy with a different kind of grief. She twisted her apron in her hands and took a hesitant step closer. 

“I’m not joking,” Magnus said gently. “I really don’t know who you are… there was an accident, a while ago… I don’t know much about myself. Did I know you?” 

“Magnus, it’s me,” the girl pleaded. “It’s Eva, your sister. Please, you have to remember me. You can’t just forget your family.” 

Magnus froze again. He sucked in a breath and stared.

“He didn’t exactly do it on purpose,” Jace drawled, standing up. “Like he said, there was an accident. He’s lost most of his memories. You said you were his sister?” 

Eva nodded, wiping the last of her tears away. Magnus drank her in. Her skin was the same colour as his and her hair was the same dark brown. She had different eyes – an icy blue – and a long sloping nose, but Magnus could see himself in her fluttering hands and angled cheekbones. There was just something familiar about her face. 

“Mum and Dad are here,” Eva said. “We’d stopped looking for you. We thought – there was a fire, at the old house, and we couldn’t find you. We thought something terrible had happened to you.” Her eyes filled with fresh tears. “We thought you were dead but, oh God, you’re here.” 

The scent of ash and smoke had been erased over the years…

“A fire,” Magnus repeated. “I remember… something about a fire. It’s there but I just can’t quite… you’re really my sister?” 

Jace snorted behind him, but Magnus only had eyes for the girl in front of him. She looked like him, and she was so, so sad. It had to be true. 

“Yes, and mum and dad are here too,” Eva said, reaching forward to grip his jumper. “Dad works in the furniture store down the road, we can go and see him right now, come on! Oh, they’ll be so happy, Magnus, they won’t believe it.” 

Her voice was soft, melodic. Entrancing. Magnus found himself reeled in. 

She threw her little notepad and pencil down on the table and began to tug Magnus towards the door. For such a small thing, she was rather strong, and Magnus almost couldn’t stop her from pulling him right out of the shop. He found he didn’t really want to. His eyes felt heavy and his legs were like liquid. 

“I just have to say…” Magnus stopped and looked at Simon. His lips were pursed and he had a shrewd expression on his face, as though he didn’t believe his eyes, and that more that more than anything sealed Magnus’s resolve. He glanced at Eva, at her confused, desperate eyes that seemed to pull him in, and then he turned to look at Jace and Alec. 

“You can’t seriously be considering this,” Jace said incredulously. “You can’t just wander off in a weird town with a stranger who claims to be your sister. Have a little sense, and let one of us come with you.” 

“She’s not lying,” Magnus said resolutely. There was a strange feeling in his stomach that he resolved to ignore. “And I’m going. This is my family and I have to know what happened to me, and why they left, and… everything. I have to see them. I have to know everything.” 

Alec leaned forward, his eyes fixed on Magnus. He looked worried, so worried, and Magnus softened slightly. He felt that same warmth that always seemed to fill him when he looked at Alec lately. He stared back steadily. 

“I get the sense that you’re going to do this regardless of what we think,” Alec said wryly. “Just… are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” 

Magnus shook his head gently. He wanted to get away, to do this alone. There was an urge, deep inside him, to let himself be pulled along by this girl. 

Alec laid a hand on Magnus’s arm and squeezed gently. “Just be careful, okay? And come back?”

Magnus jerked. “Of course, I’ll come back. I will, I promise. I’ll come right back.”

Then he let Eva tug him out of the café and onto the street.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seriously, trust me. I haven't given Magnus a random family member, so just trust me. Thank you so much! Please leave a comment/kudos and let me know what you thought and come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr, @cococranberries on twitter and @owlev on discord. Someone asked, so I figured I'd put all my info in here, just in case. Thank you!


	16. The Boy in the Cafe II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He crawled after them, one hand clamped firmly over his mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahh, smaller chapters really annoy me, I feel bad. But it's a necessary one, because another thing happens in the next one, and you need some space in between. Thank you for the lovely response to the last chapter!!! You're all wonderful <3

The café felt quieter with Magnus gone, which was stupid because the boy hardly ever spoke, and when he did it was with a soft, patient voice, like he was waiting to be interrupted. Still, the feeling persisted, and Jace wished he had some music to help drown out the silence. 

“This is weird,” he huffed eventually, shoving his feet up onto the opposite seat. Simon swatted at his ankle irritably and then left him alone, his gaze fixed on the window. 

“It is,” Alec agreed quietly. He was passing a bottle of water back and forth between his hands and the slosh of liquid grated on Jace’s nerves. He didn’t say anything though; the bottle’s label had been reduced to shreds, and Alec’s expression was oddly blank. 

“Something’s wrong,” Jace said. He folded his arms as he slouched back against the seat. 

Simon snorted. “Nothing’s wrong.” He didn’t sound convinced. 

“Fine,” Jace snapped. “Something isn’t right. There, better?” 

“Don’t argue,” Alec said absently, sighing. “Everything’s fine. He’ll be back soon, anyway. He said he’d come straight back.” 

“We should have gone with him,” Jace said grumpily. 

“He didn’t want us to,” Simon reminded him snippily. “Remember? And can you really blame him? He just found his family, Jace. Why would he want us there? He definitely didn’t look like he wanted us there.”

“I think he was just nervous,” Alec said. “He still hasn’t quite mastered the art of appropriate facial expressions.” He sounded far too fond, and Jace cut him a look, but Alec wasn’t paying attention. 

Jace gritted his teeth as silence fell over the table. He didn’t like this. There was something wrong, and he knew the others knew it too, even if they weren’t willing to admit it. 

“What if she’s not his family?” Jace blurted out, and Simon and Alec both groaned. 

“I’m serious,” Jace persisted. “She looked suspicious. And what are the chances of her just casually finding Magnus in a busy café, in a completely different county to the one we found him in? What if she’s just conning him or something? She could be anybody. She didn’t even look like him. Just because they’ve got the same hair colour doesn’t mean they’re related.”

“Why would she be conning him?” Alec asked patiently. “She must have been a pretty good actress, if she was.” 

“Anyone can fake a few tears,” Jace scoffed, waving his hand. Simon rolled his eyes and took a sip of his coffee, but Jace wasn’t fooled; Simon wouldn’t stop staring out of the window, like he was waiting for Magnus to appear in front of him.

“He was leaving anyway,” Simon said, after a few moments of silence. Both Jace and Alec narrowed their eyes at him. 

“What are you talking about? Where would he go?” Alec asked sharply. 

“He said he saw a police station nearby,” Simon said. He was obviously uncomfortable. “He promised he wouldn’t mention us, or the moors where we found him. He said he shouldn’t have brought us into this danger, and that hopefully the police would be able to help him with his memory, or find his family.” 

Jace gaped at him. He could feel the disbelief and anger pouring off Alec like steam, but Simon continued to stare out of the window as though nothing was wrong. As though Magnus hadn’t decided to simply up and leave them, after everything they had been through. 

“He wouldn’t just leave,” Jace said. “What did you do?” 

“Jace,” Alec warned, although he sounded unsure. 

“I didn’t do anything,” Simon snapped. “We had an argument, and he decided to leave, but that isn’t going to be a problem now because he’s found his sister, hasn’t he? He doesn’t need help to find his family!”

“I’m telling you, something is not right.” Jace slammed his hand down on the table. The couple at the table near them descended into nervous silence. Alec grabbed Jace’s hand and prised it off the table, fixing them both with a stern look. 

“Simon, I don’t know what happened, but you _will_ fix it when Magnus comes back, alright?” Alec held his gaze until Simon sagged into his chair, nodding sullenly, cheeks slightly pink. Then he turned on Jace, exasperation clear in every line of his face. “And Jace, for God’s sake, Magnus is fine. She’s his real sister, alright? She looked like him – yes she did, don’t argue – she was the right age, she was crying all over the place and she knew his name, too. She’s genuine, there’s no need –”

Alec choked mid-sentence. 

Jace watched him splutter over nothing, watched his shaky hands lower and grip the edge of the table. Jace caught one and held it tightly, trying to gage what was wrong. Alec had a look of vague horror in his eyes. Something sunk in Jace’s stomach, and he could feel every muscle in his body bunching up with tension. 

“Alec?” Jace asked sharply. 

“His name,” Alec said, appalled. All of the colour drained from his face. He looked like he was about to be sick. “She knew his name.”

In a flash, Alec was up out of his seat and scrambling around the table, sprinting for the door. The chime jangled loudly as he slammed the door open and ducked out of the café. Jace watched him go, mouth slack with shock. He caught Simon’s eye and both of them were up within seconds, gathering up the papers and chasing after him. 

The street was busy, and Jace almost tripped twice in the space of two seconds, boots catching on the cobblestones. He stuck close to Simon, hand fisted in the back of his t-shirt, but it was hard to keep track of Alec. When Alec walked, people parted like curtains, and when he ran, people dived out of the way like their lives depended on it. 

They found Alec next to a kitschy little card shop that sold postcards and trinkets. He was dragging his hand frantically through his hair and whipping his head this way and that, real fear in his eyes. 

“What the fuck, man?” Jace panted, skidding to a stop in front of him. 

“His name’s not Magnus,” Alec hissed. 

“What?” Simon demanded. “What are you talking about?” 

“His name,” Alec explained quickly, still glancing around in panic. “He couldn’t remember it, but we couldn’t just keep calling him ‘boy’, so I offered to look for names on my phone. He picked ‘Magnus’ because it – well, I don’t know why, but not because it’s actually his name.” 

“That girl,” Simon said, catching on quickly. “She called him Magnus, repeatedly. If she was really his sister, she would have used his real name.” 

“I know we’ve based a lot of this on coincidences,” Alec said. “But even I don’t think we could have picked Magnus’s real name out of all the names in the world. That’s too much.”

“Why the fuck didn’t he notice?” Jace asked. His voice was a little more high-pitched than usual. 

“He must be used to it by now,” Simon said, glancing around too. “He was probably shocked, and a bit overwhelmed. For all intents and purposes, Magnus is his name now. Where did that girl say she was taking him?” 

Jace couldn’t remember. He couldn’t think over the frantic pounding in his head or the sick feeling in his stomach. He knew something wasn’t right, had known it as soon as the girl had dropped the plate and rushed over. 

“You should have told us sooner,” Jace said angrily. Alec whipped around to look at him, eyes narrowed. “Was it really that hard to slip into conversation? ‘Oh, by the way, his name’s not actually Magnus, just thought you might like to know that we made it up for no good reason.’” 

“What was I supposed to do? Just not let him have a name? He wanted to feel more normal,” Alec seethed. “He’d just been buried alive, for God’s sake, I was only helping. It’s not like I could have foreseen this.” 

“Shut up, both of you!” Simon shouted abruptly, throwing his hands up as though he could stop their words by sheer force of will. Jace and Alec froze immediately, staring at Simon with wide eyes. Simon had never shouted at Alec before. “You can place blame later, if you want, but this isn’t helping at all right now. Magnus’s sister – that girl, said that their dad worked nearby, in a shop, but I can’t remember which shop.” 

“A furniture shop,” Jace remembered suddenly. “She said he worked in a furniture shop.”

It only took a minute to find a local who could point them in the right direction. It wasn’t a big village, and luck was on their side; there was only one furniture shop, and it was just up the hill from where they were standing, nestled between a little pub and a charity shop. When they arrived at the top of the hill, breathless and panting, they discovered why the local had looked at them strangely when they asked after it. 

The store was completely empty. Arched, floor-to-ceiling windows had been boarded up a long time ago with wood that was now a little damp and crooked. The bottom half of the front door had been ripped away, revealing a large gap in the wood and a dark, dank entryway. 

“Are you sure that he said furniture shop?” Alec asked, dismayed. 

Jace swallowed thickly. “Definitely. Should we go in?” 

“What’s the point in that?” Simon's cheeks were very pale. “It’s closed down, abandoned. The girl obviously lied to us in case we decided to come after him.”

“We should have a look anyway,” Alec decided. “Just in case. If we find nothing, we’ll just go back to the room we’re staying in and figure out what to do next.” He brushed off his hands and got to his knees, crawling through the bottom half of the door. Jace heard the slick sound as his hands repeatedly stuck to the wet floor and grimaced in disgust. He would have offered to keep watch, but then Simon crawled under it too, and Jace wasn’t about to let Simon be the decent one here. They had a friend to find. 

He crawled after them, one hand clamped firmly over his mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you! Please leave a comment or a kudos and let me know what you thought. God, it's really hard to type when you have a cat pawing your hand. Anyway, come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr or cococranberries on twitter. Thank you so much!


	17. The Boy in the Distance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I’m so sorry, Alec. You have to run, you have to find mom. They were looking for her, and they’ll be looking for you next. I love you both._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY. First of all, there are mentioned deaths in this scene of characters we know from the show, but I swear to God I would never be this cruel. You just gotta trust me. TRUST ME. And second of all, we finally get Alec's POV! Yay! Thank you so much for the lovely response to the last chapter, I loved your reactions to the whole name thing, it was brilliant. Thank you! Hope you like this one!

Alec collapsed onto the edge of the bed and put his head in his hands, elbows on his knees. He was dizzy with guilt, his stomach flipping over with fear. Despite how many times Simon had murmured that it wasn’t his fault, he couldn’t get Jace’s accusation out of his head. He kept seeing Magnus’s bewildered stare as he was led away from them, kept hearing the shop-keeper’s description of the man who had taken him. A large man who wore a dark red cloak and kept his face hidden from view. Heavy boots and abnormally pale skin where it showed beneath the vast hood. 

They had looked for a good half an hour before a local came and found them, turfing them out of the abandoned shop and demanding to know what they were doing. When they described Magnus, and asked if he had seen him, the man had given them the description and told them to be on their way. 

“How is it the same person?” Simon asked numbly. He was on the bed, too, on the other side. Alec glanced up; he could see Simon’s hands shaking even from here. 

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Alec agreed. “They weren’t following Magnus, they were following us. They’ve been following us since we left Brooklyn. Why change focus now and take Magnus?” 

“Maybe as a way to lure us in,” Simon suggested. “They know he’s our friend. They must know that we’re going to look for him, and that’ll mean we have to interact with them, eventually. But then why make it so hard for us to find him if that’s the case? God, I don’t know.” 

The door opened, and Jace slid through it. He was flicking his lighter open and closed, eyes distant. The door slipped shut behind him, leaving them in an uncomfortable silence. 

“Jace,” Alec said quietly, but Jace put his hand up. 

“I shouldn’t have blamed you,” Jace said, and his voice was full of anger, but Alec knew Jace. Jace was his friend, his brother, his partner, and Alec knew him, and he knew that most of Jace’s anger was turned inwards, aimed a himself. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault, and I shouldn’t have blamed you. Anyway, I get the feeling that I’m not the one who’s the most upset here.”

He stared very hard at Alec, and Alec’s stomach flipped over unpleasantly. He swallowed thickly and looked away, pretending to be especially interested in the power-blue wallpaper. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Simon asked, looking confused. 

“Nothing,” Jace said lightly, sinking into the overstuffed armchair in the corner. “Anyway, what were you talking about before I so rudely interrupted?” 

Simon still looked confused, frowning between the two of them, but when it became clear that there was no explanation forthcoming, he shrugged and outlined their conversation to Jace. 

Alec was only half-listening. His mind was far away, in the kitchen of a cottage, watching a strange boy place pieces of bacon in a pan with flour-streaked hands. He could smell soap from the hotel, and the antiseptic from the cut on Magnus’s cheek. 

_Should have kissed him then,_ Alec thought to himself miserably. _When you had the chance._

It wasn’t a new desire, to kiss boys, but it had still taken him by surprise. He didn’t know Magnus, not well, and he had expected to feel a lot of things for him, things like fear and sympathy and pity. What he got, instead, was a deep worry and a heart-wrenching pain and a breathless sort of longing. 

“I think we should do what we came here to do. We’ll go to the address and meet with Agatha, and once we know what the letter says we can focus on finding Magnus. If it’s the same people that are after us, then maybe the letter will help us find them. Hopefully, that will lead us right to Magnus.”

“And if it isn’t?” Alec asked. “If it’s different people?”

Jace scoffed, “What are the chances of that?” 

“You keep forgetting, but I can’t,” Alec said. “Magnus was buried alive, and people don’t do something like that without reason. Whoever did it to him could still be looking for him. Maybe they went back to the site, or maybe they were watching when we dug him up.”

“It’s been three years since he was buried there,” Jace said firmly. “I know you don’t believe it, Simon, but it’s true, which means it’s likely that whoever did it thinks he’s been dead all this time. They wouldn’t still be watching it after three years. Chances are they don’t even live here anymore. I know if I buried someone I wouldn’t hang around the burial site just waiting to be questioned and arrested when the body was eventually found.” 

Simon ground his teeth together, but didn’t argue. Maybe that meant he was coming around, although Alec doubted it. Simon could be stubborn when he wanted to be; they all could. 

“So, we’re agreed,” Jace decided. “We’ll drive to Agatha’s address now. Do you still have the papers?” 

“I picked them up when we left the café,” Alec said. “Come on, we’re probably already late.” 

They were late, but not by much. They caught Agatha as she was coming up the driveway to a quaint little house, with a neatly-trimmed lawn and an arch of honeysuckle near the front door. There were flowers everywhere, but the garden had a look of control, of careful planning. 

Agatha spotted them as she was opening her front door, and beckoned them inside. She looked harassed, her hair a little tangled and her glasses askew. 

“I’m sorry if we made you rush,” Simon said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “But we’re on a bit of a time-schedule right now.” 

Agatha squinted at them. “Weren’t there four of you, before? Come in, come in.”

She ushered them inside and flicked the lights on. The house was warm, but not stiflingly so, and the narrow hallway led into a modest living room. It was comfortably cluttered; books lined the walls and soft rugs blanketed the floor. A calico was curled up on the end of the nearest couch, tail tucked over its whiskers. 

Agatha sat on the edge of an armchair and pulled a small end table towards her before beckoning Alec forward. “Let’s see those papers again. I’ve barely been able to focus these past few classes. Here, let me find something to write with.”

She dug around in her bag for a pen, while Alec fiddled with the papers. As always, he was reluctant to let them go; he had very few links to his mother, and he wanted to keep the ones he did have safe and close. Agatha waited patiently, hand outstretched, and if she picked up on his hesitance, she didn’t say anything. 

Simon wandered over to examine the bookcase, dripping his fingers over the spines. Jace paced back and forth near the window, hands jammed deep in his pockets as he muttered under his breath. Alec knew why Jace was so upset, but he was trying not to think about Magnus. 

And then suddenly, Magnus was all he could think about. 

Staggering backwards, Alec muttered something about needing some air before he slipped out of the front door. The breeze slapped him in the face, carrying the faint hint of sea-salt. He breathed in deeply, the fuzziness still lingering at the edges of his vision. He sat down hard on the front steps. 

Every now and again, it would hit him. 

Max. Izzy. His father. He could see their faces swimming in front of him, mouths slack and eyes glazed. He hadn’t been able to look for long before he had staggered away, vomiting heavily in the hallway. Jace had found him, bent at the knee and crying, and nothing on earth had been able to stop Jace from ducking into their father’s study, where the bodies lay. He had come out only a minute later, white-faced and breathing harshly, clutching a fistful of papers like a lifeline. 

Alec had steeled himself, and gone back inside while Jace called the police. The study had been a mess, torn apart, like the cottage. Bricks had come loose from the walls and wallpaper had been ripped away, carpets rucked up and the light fixtures smashed. Glass littered the floor, crunching beneath Alec’s boots. Alec had scoured the place for clues, searching frantically until he heard the sirens outside in the street. 

The papers had been hidden away, and the note, the one had had found in Izzy’s hand, had been secreted away in his pocket. 

He drew it out now, and stared at it. The lines were shaky, written in his sisters’ familiar hand. He traced each letter with his forefinger, smiling faintly, even though everything in him felt like crying. There was no way to describe the grief inside him. It weighed him down like armour, filled his stomach like food, coated his tongue like a layer of ash. He could taste it with every swallow. It sunk into every pore, curled around his ankles and wrists like heavy cuffs. He could feel it on his eyelashes, the tips of his ears, the bridge of his nose. It was everywhere, all encompassing, making it hard to breathe, to think, to sleep. 

Jace was a comforting weight at his side, always. Simon was a distraction, a helping hand, a friend. Still, they were both reminders of what he had lost. Simon had dated Izzy, had spent evenings at their house, watching crappy television and shouting at the screen, throwing popcorn that Izzy always made him clean up later. He had shared comic books with Max, made him watch Star Wars and taken him to Comic Con that one year, dressed as a huge furry creature and a space pilot. He had never had much to do with Robert, but the loss was still there. 

Jace was family. He had shared everything Alec had shared, missed them just as much. Every time he looked at Jace, he saw Izzy’s laugh, her teasing smirk, her special brand of soothing comfort. He saw Max wrapped in Jace’s arms, saw them both asleep on the couch, snoring loudly, books abandoned on the floor. He saw every clapped shoulder, every proud smile that Robert had ever given him. He saw his family. 

_I’m so sorry, Alec. You have to run, you have to find mom. They were looking for her, and they’ll be looking for you next. I love you both._

It was nothing ground-breaking, nothing helpful, but it was Izzy’s last words. Alec didn’t know if they gave him strength, or comfort. All he knew was that he couldn’t let the note go. He slipped it back into his pocket and tipped his face up to the sky, and then stopped, suddenly. Across the street, stood a man, with bronze skin and dark hair. He was standing, talking to a woman with a buggy, and even though Alec knew, knew that it couldn’t be Magnus, he found himself standing anyway. 

He tripped down the steps and stumbled across the garden, his usual grace gone. He had to see, had to get closer – he was so focused that he wasn’t looking where he was going, and he didn’t notice the flowers at his feet, the circle that beckoned him. 

He turned at the last second, as the front door opened and Jace and Simon came out. There was a flash of silver light, reflecting off the window, and Alec blinked as it obscured his vision. He heard a shout, felt a shuddering sensation all over his body, and when he opened his eyes, he was in a new world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment/kudos and let me know what you thought, your theories etc, I love hearing from you. And come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr or @cococranberries on twitter. Thank you!


	18. The Boy in the Barn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “They will come for you.”
> 
> Magnus strained against the bonds, his heart pounding in his chest. His head was free to move, but he couldn’t lift it very far, not with the way he was tied down to the table. At least, he assumed it was a table, but the room he was in was dark and dismal, so he couldn’t see much of anything. Shapes loomed in the darkness, made more terrifying by their anonymity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to post this tomorrow, but I genuinely couldn't wait. So, it's going up now! This chapter and the ones following were my favourite to write, I really hope you enjoy it. And thank you so much for all the lovely response, I really, really appreciate it! Thank you!
> 
> Warnings for creepiness, a tiny bit of violence, threats and monologuing villains.

“They will come for you.”

Magnus strained against the bonds, his heart pounding in his chest. His head was free to move, but he couldn’t lift it very far, not with the way he was tied down to the table. At least, he assumed it was a table, but the room he was in was dark and dismal, so he couldn’t see much of anything. Shapes loomed in the darkness, made more terrifying by their anonymity. 

It looked and smelled like an old barn. The wind howled and shrieked as it ripped through the thin, creaking walls. The place shuddered and shook, rippling like seawater. A stream of faint light peered in through one of the windows up above him, and some seeped in through the uneven crack in the big door at the far end of the barn, but the rest of the place was seeped in darkness. Rotting hay surrounded him in barrels, and there was a wetness to the air.

He didn’t know how long he’d been here, but his fear had turned to anger, to exhaustion. 

“They will come for you, and there is nothing you can do to stop us from tearing them apart.” 

The voice peeled out of the darkness, as soft and slippery as silk. Eva’s face melted out of the shadows, and Magnus bit back a curse word he had learned from Jace. The girl wasn’t called Eva, in truth. She wasn’t his sister, wasn’t even human. 

Her skin rippled, taking on a blue tinge. Skin peeled back, and her face changed, becoming sharper, angled, littered with points and stretched smooth. It was no longer the face of a sad young girl, but the face of a monster. She grew taller as Magnus watched, and thinner too, until her clothes hung off her bones, like a canopy draped over sticks. She was a mere morsel of a person. 

“They won’t come for me,” Magnus said. His voice was hoarse from shouting, and his wrists ached from the weight of the ropes, which bit into his skin. “They barely know me. What do you want from them?”

“We want the chime child,” she said hungrily, her hollowed cheeks puffing up as she spoke. She crept closer, and Magnus steeled himself, forcing himself not to flinch back. “We want the last chime child. We want him, and we want the one who made him. We want the one who should belong to us, and the one who used to belong to us.”

Magnus parted his lips, moved to speak, but she hissed, and he snapped his mouth shut reluctantly. He had a horrible feeling that she was partly talking about Alec, and his breathing picked up, his heart stuttering. 

“You don’t need to ask,” she said softly. “You already know what a chime child is, deep in your mind. You know everything.”

Magnus laughed, a desperate cracking sound. “You definitely have the wrong person. I don’t know anything. I don’t even know who I am.”

She tilted her head, watching him with narrow, ice-blue eyes. “I do. Now, tell me. Tell me what a chime child is.”

Magnus shook his head, the back of his skull pressed hard against the wood behind him. “I can’t.”

A long, needle of a knife glinted in front of his face. Where it pressed against his skin, frost bloomed. She ran a trail down his cheek, leaving him gasping. 

“Tell me.”

“I just told you, I don’t know.”

The knife pressed in a little deeper, and Magnus began to talk. Words poured out of him, unbidden. 

“They are children, born at exactly the right time, on the chime of the old bells. They are said to be magic, to have abilities beyond those of normal humans. Some could talk to animals, others could heal people, and some could talk to the dead.”

“And some,” the girl said, taking away her knife, “could come back from the dead.”

Magnus inhaled sharply. Alec. She had to be talking about Alec.

“How did I know that?” he demanded. “Is that what I am? One of the chime children?” 

“No, little lamb. Mother Nature is greedy,” said the girl eagerly. “She took your secrets in exchange for her own. She sung you lullabies of the land and whispered words in your dead little ears, because there was no one you could share them with. Imagine, three years’ worth of secrets, of dreams, stored up in this little head of yours. Imagine what you could do with knowledge like that. Imagine the power in those secrets.” 

“Do I look as if I’ve got any power?” Magnus demanded, tugging on the bonds around his wrists. He felt an unfamiliar burst of anger and it shocked him silent. He had thought anger would be hot and mad and irrational, all fizzing energy and surges of heat, but all he felt was a cold weight in his stomach. Ice flooded his veins. 

He didn’t want to think about how this monster knew about his secret. How she knew about the things he knew, how she knew that he had died, how he had lived in a grave for three years. 

The girl giggled. Shard, they called her – he knew that now, but he didn’t know how he knew it. The same way he knew about chime children and old wars and monsters. Magnus knew that wasn’t her real name. It couldn’t be. None of these people had real names, not anymore. Their identity was as disfigured as their appearance, as altered as their morals. He wasn’t about to humour her by asking for an old, dead soul that used to exist in the body she now inhabited. 

“Power isn’t on the outside,” Shard said. “Walker knew that, as did her family, and they paid the price. But you know all about the cost of such things, don’t you?” 

Magnus frowned. Walker? Who was Walker? Another freak with a sense of their own superiority, hungry for recognition and revenge, no doubt. Another monster that used to be human. 

Shard’s face went blank and then glee lit her up from the inside, turning her pale skin brighter than the sun. She clapped her hands together happily and laughed, a high-pitched, raw sound. 

“You don’t know,” she cooed. “You don’t know about Walker. You’ve been looking for her all this time, you know, and you still don’t know who she is. It doesn’t matter, of course. You’ll never find her. No matter how hard that boy looks, he’ll never find her. She walks every road but the one he’s on, and she walks them fast. She has to, if she wants to escape us.” 

“Who are you talking about?” Magnus snapped angrily. “Who’s Walker?” 

“Your friend has a secret, and it’s one best left in the dark,” Shard said. Her gleeful expression faded into something impassive and business-like. She clapped her hands again, but this time it sounded like a command. “Your secrets, on the other hand, I need to shed a little light on.” 

Something on the ceiling moved. Magnus’s eyes widened. It was a hulking mass of shadows. At first, Magnus thought it was a cloud of black birds, but then he realised that the shadows were joined together; it was one thing, a monstrous thing that clung to the ceiling. 

He was clinging to my ceiling, hanging there like something out of a nightmare. I tried to close my eyes, but I couldn’t. 

Magnus remembered the words with a sense of dread. He tried, desperately, to close his eyes, but his eyelids wouldn’t cooperate. His face remained frozen like that, his wide-eyed gaze fixed on the shadows. They moved when the girl clapped her hands again, lurching sickeningly down from the ceiling. Magnus’s eyes followed it; he couldn’t look away. 

It was the kind of monster that even adults feared. 

“Do you know why children scream in the night, out of fear for something that their parents can’t see?” Shard whispered. She bent until she was level with his face, her cool breath fanning over his ear. Magnus flinched. She was so cold. “Because of him. Because of this creature, this monstrous creature. He looks into their eyes and he drags everything out for them to see, their fears and their worst memories. He can see right into their minds, and he feasts on what he finds.” 

“Children are innocent,” Magnus said. His eyes stung. “They don’t deserve that.”

The shadows seemed to smile. From out of the seething mass came a face so mangled and terrifying that tears ran down Magnus’s cheeks. It was a monstrous creature with a face of rage and pain. In another world, Magnus would have pitied it. 

“Innocence will not save them,” Freak said, the shadows bleeding into a warped body. “Innocence will not make them strong. I am protecting them from their own helplessness.”

“His logic is a little skewed, but so is he.” Shard shrugged. 

Freak slithered to the side, out of sight, and Magnus could blink again. He crushed his eyes closed and tried to breathe, but Shard would not let him look away for long. She gripped his chin and tilted it up until he opened his eyes again.

“What made him like that?” Magnus asked. “Freak?”

Shard lifted one eyebrow. “So, you know him. Good. I was beginning to worry that you would be almost entirely useless. And as for Freak, well, he made himself like that.”

Magnus just waited. Shard seemed to enjoy the sound of her own voice. 

“We take what they call us and we make it our own,” Shard hissed, leaning over him with a sharp smile. “We take our own pain and suffering and we twist it until we are the twisted ones and then we pay it forward, until they are the ones suffering. A boy who hides under the bed from a man with alcohol-soaked breath and rage in his fists becomes the thing under your bed that you hide from. A girl who sprints across the streets in fear of the men hollering at her becomes the woman who prowls after them, the one who keeps the other girls’ safe at night when they make their way home.” 

“What about you?” Magnus asked. “What happened to you to make you like this?”

Shard bared her teeth again. Magnus could see the sharp points glinting like icicles in the single shaft of light that fell through the broken ceiling. He couldn’t think properly through the pain in his wrists and his head. 

She tapped one finger against Magnus’s nose. Her skin was black and blue, coated in a layer of thick frost, and it stung his skin. He wondered if she would even feel it, if her finger broke or if he bit at it. Not that he wanted to bite at it, but he wanted her to stop touching him, and even biting was better than just lying there. He had to fight back somehow. 

He snapped his teeth and she laughed in his face, standing up. 

“Mother Nature didn’t take your spirit, then,” Shard said. “Good. An emotionless puppet can be entertaining, but I prefer the process of making them that way, as opposed to pulling the strings. You can dance later, little lamb. I promise.” 

Her voice was the rattle of chains, the split of thin ice under young, questing feet. Freak’s voice was the gnaw of pain at the edges of an empty stomach. Both held an urgency that captured Magnus, a slick layer of malice and a bitter bite. 

“What are you going to do to Alec?” Magnus asked quietly. 

Shard seemed to freeze, her eyes widening in surprise. She watched him for a moment, head tilted, before she said thoughtfully, “You’re not afraid for yourself.”

Magnus was afraid from himself, he was very afraid, but his fear for Alec overrode that. These monsters were looking for him. God knows what they wanted to do with him. Magnus was already living through this horror, but Alec had already suffered enough. He had been hunted across the country, and Magnus didn’t want him to get hurt, to be ruined, broken, to be any sadder than he already was. He wanted him safe. He wanted all of them safe. 

“You’re afraid for him. I can’t tell if that’s brave or stupid.”

She turned away, waving a hand. Freak appeared, and Magnus hardened his expression, glaring fiercely up at the monster. If he was going to die, it would not be with fear on his face. 

“Open his mind,” Shard said. “See what’s inside. And then kill him.”

Freak grinned, his rotten, broken teeth glinting dully. He raised his hand, and the backwards fingers loomed over him, twisted around to grab his face. The first hint of fingernails grazed his skin, and then there was a loud crack, and the earth shook. 

Shard let out a shriek of rage as the floor vibrated beneath her feet, sending her stumbling into a hay bale. Magnus choked back a laugh even through his confusion as Freak disappeared into the rafters again, hovering above him. This time, Magnus didn’t meet his eyes. 

Shard spat out a clump of hay and hissed. “Fools. The fools. Which one of them left?”

Voices spat out answers in the darkness, from all around him, and Magnus shuddered. How many of them were lingering, watching? How many monsters were there in the world? How many of them were in this room?

“The boy is gone,” said one voice. “The lines never lie. The boy, Walker’s son, has left this world.”

Magnus felt his heart seize in his chest. He had no idea what was going on. “What are you talking about?”

“Your boy has left this earth,” Shard snapped, her face twisting cruelly. “We need him. We need him to lead us to Walker. All of you, get ready to move. We leave now.”

The shadows hissed, and began to melt away. The barn filled with light, although darkness had begun to gather outside, the kind that fell with night. Magnus held his breath until it was just Freak and Shard left behind. She watched him steadily

“I could kill you,” she mused. “Something tells me you could be useful, though. We planned to lure them here, but something has changed.” She put a hand on his chin and lifted it. “Do you want to live, little lamb?”

Magnus jerked his head out of her grasp. “What do you think?”

“Then you will do as I say,” Shard said. “You will find the rings, and you will find the boy, the chime child, and you will bring him back. When you return, we will find you.”

“The rings,” Magnus repeated blankly, but Shard was already moving away. “What rings? What are you talking about?”

The last of the shadows moved, and Magnus was left alone, the sound of his voice echoing around the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Magnus! This man, honestly. I hope you liked it! You finally met the villains! I hope I did them justice. Please leave a comment/kudos if you liked it, and come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr. I'm doing Christmas fics if you want to prompt some. Thank you so much!


	19. The Boy on the Moors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “They said a lot of things that I don’t understand, about chime children and rings. They were going to kill me, but something distracted them. They said that something had happened to Alec. They said he had left this world.” 
> 
> Jace’s face seemed to crack down the middle, revealing a layer of grief and anger so pure and heavy that it took all the oxygen out of the air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aha! I'm back! Sorry it took so long, but Christmas has been hectic. Hope you all had a lovely December, regardless of whether you celebrate or not. Enjoy this chapter, the next one is fun!

Nobody came looking for Magnus. He stayed as still as possible, listening hard for footsteps or voices, and by the time he resigned himself to the fact that nobody was coming for him, the sky had darkened and the air had cooled considerably. It still wasn’t as cold as Shard, Magnus consoled himself as he tugged on his bonds. They were fraying and cold, but they still chafed his wrists enough to make blood run down his skin. 

He tugged one hand free and winced as the blood ran back into his numb, freezing fingers. He worked at the knot around his other hand and staggered off the table, which was little more than a slab of wood. He was pretty sure he had splinters in his ass, but he was more concerned about where he was, and how to get back to his friends. 

His friends. 

God, Magnus felt stupid. He had left them immediately at the slightest hint of his family, and it had all turned out to be a trap. He couldn’t decide if he was grateful that they hadn’t followed him into a trap or upset that they hadn’t come looking for him. He had promised Alec that he could come right back, but it was hours later and he was still alone. It either meant he was far enough away that they couldn’t find him, or that they hadn’t bothered to look in the first place. 

The barn door was rusted shut, so he had to climb through one of the bare windows, mindful of the edges where the glass had presumably cracked and come loose. His bare feet hit the wet grass outside and he shivered, his ragged jumper flittering as the cold air wrapped itself around him. It was dark enough that all he could see were faint shapes in the distance and fields of brown grass.

He staggered towards a slip of road visible in the distance. His mind was racing, trying to figure out what it all meant. What did Shard mean, when she said that Alec had left this world?

She had said Walker’s son, which meant that Alec’s mother, the one he had been looking for, was not what she appeared to be. Was she one of these monsters? Was she the one that used to belong to them?

And what were the rings? How was he supposed to find Alec if he didn’t know what the rings were? And what would he do when he brought him back? Because he would bring him back. He would not leave Alec wherever he was, if he truly had left this world. 

“I need to find Jace and Simon,” he muttered to himself. They would know where Alec was. They would have to believe him, when he said there was danger, and they would have to help him if they wanted Alec back. And he had no doubts that they would want Alec back. He had no doubts that they would move heaven and earth to get Alec back. 

He followed the road for long, drawn out minutes. He climbed steep hills, still barefoot, his feet bloody and aching, and he could have cried with relief when he reached the top, and was met with the sight of headlights. He broke into a run, throwing himself into the middle of the road, hands thrown up into the air as he shouted hoarsely. 

The car swerved to a stop, an angry beep bellowing through the silence. It narrowly missed flattening Magnus, who stayed where he was, exhausted, his hands still up in the air. He lowered them slowly as someone got out of the car and slammed the door shut, obviously pissed. Magnus caught a glimpse of golden hair, and his heart stopped. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” Jace seethed, storming towards him. “You can’t just throw yourself in front of cars in the middle of the night and expect not to get crushed to death, you idiot.”

“Jace,” Magnus said, and Jace stopped where he was, jerking back. He squinted, illuminated in the dusty light from the headlights, and when he finally got a good glimpse of Magnus, he started swearing loudly, a long stream of curse words. It was music to Magnus’s ears. 

Hands gripped him and tugged him close, wrapping around his shoulders. 

“What are you doing?” Magnus asked, bewildered. Over Jace’s shoulder, he saw Simon open the door and clamber out, his mouth hanging open. Magnus gave a little wave. 

“It’s called a hug,” Jace said, his voice cracking. “Don’t get all emotional about it.”

Simon shoved Jace away and yanked Magnus into his own hug. Magnus made a stifled noise of surprise. 

“You’re going to get blood all over you,” he said. Simon drew back immediately, and Jace hissed an expletive under his breath. 

“What happened?” Jace demanded sharply. “We scoured the town for you, but we couldn’t find you. That girl, the one who came into the café claiming to be your sister…”

“She wasn’t my sister,” Magnus said. “Her face changed as soon as we left, and that figure appeared, the one that was following us. They knocked me out, and when I woke up, I was tied up in a barn.” 

“Please,” Simon said, glaring at Jace. “Don’t say ‘kinky’, or I’ll slap you.” 

Jace snapped his mouth shut, and arched an eyebrow, clearly daring Simon to try.

“They said a lot of things that I don’t understand, about chime children and rings. They were going to kill me, but something distracted them. They said that something had happened to Alec. They said he had left this world.” 

Jace’s face seemed to crack down the middle, revealing a layer of grief and anger so pure and heavy that it took all the oxygen out of the air. Magnus raised a hand cautiously and settled it on Jace’s shoulder, squeezing gently. 

“He disappeared,” Simon said, swallowing thickly. “Come on, we need to get out of the road. We can go over everything properly as we drive.”

Simon was in the driver’s seat, which meant Jace squeezed into the back with Magnus and helped him clean up the blood. 

“Is that ice on your face?” Jace demanded, prising a chunk off his skin and flicking it away. Magnus couldn’t feel a thing. “God, you’re a mess. Here, give me your feet, I’ve got bandages.”

Magnus hesitantly put his feet in Jace’s lap, watching as he cleaned up the cuts as best he could before wrapping them up carefully. The motions were soothing, comforting, and Magnus found himself relaxing as he explained what had happened, not leaving out any details. Simon made several sceptical noises, but otherwise didn’t argue. Jace seemed to take every word at face value. 

“What happened to Alec?” Magnus asked. He leaned against his seat, pulling his feet out of Jace’s lap and rummaging around for socks. There were some clean ones left in the bag he had taken with him, but he didn’t know which bag was his. 

“He’s gone,” Jace said tightly. “We went to Professor Arnold’s house, hoping there might be some kind of clue as to what had taken you in the papers. Alec went outside, in the garden, while she was working. We went out to see if he was alright, and there was this flash of silver light.”

“I thought it was moonlight, at first,” Simon added, frowning as he slowed down, weaving through the country lanes. 

“Yeah, except it was the middle of the day, and the sun was out,” Jace said. “Alec took a step back, to get away from the light, and he just… vanished. Gone, between one second and the next.”

Magnus swallowed thickly. He wanted desperately for Alec to be sat in the front seat, gritting his teeth as Simon and Jace bickered. Jace looked lost, gazing at a point just over Magnus’s shoulder. Simon’s hands twitched on the wheel, like he wanted to reach out, so Magnus did it for him. He abandoned his quest for socks and gently laid a hand on Jace’s knee, leaning forward.

“We’re going to get him back,” Magnus promised him. “We will get him back. What happened then?”

“Agatha finished translating the papers,” Jace said. “I think she was a bit freaked out that someone disappeared in her garden, even though she didn’t see it, so she finished them quickly and basically shoved us out of the house. We searched the place, looking for some sort of clue, but we couldn’t find anything.”

“Nothing?” Magnus asked, dismayed. “Nothing at all? What about where he’d been standing?”

Simon shrugged. “Just flowers.”

Something twitched in the back of Magnus’s brain, and he stilled. Jace narrowed his eyes at him, but Magnus didn’t say anything. He was thinking, hard, about what Shard had said to him. 

“Were they in a circle?” Magnus asked quietly. “The flowers, where Alec was standing, were they in a circle? A ring?” 

Simon glanced at him out of the corner of his eyes. “How did you know that?” 

Magnus blew out a breath. He knew, now, what the rings meant, and he knew that Alec truly was gone. 

“Where were you driving to, when you found me? You must have had some idea of where to go in mind.”

Simon and Jace shared a long glance in the mirror, and Magnus was reminded of all the times Alec had glanced at him while they were driving, eyes soft and concerned. He swallowed past the lump on his throat, and focused on the thin thread of his thoughts. It waved in front of him like a kite string, fluttering from place to place, and he could barely get a grip on what he was thinking. 

“The papers, they said to go to a specific place on the moors, back in Devon,” Jace said. “It said we would find our answers there. It said… it said that’s where the worlds come together, where the sun meets the moon, where those we have lost can come back to us.” 

Simon snorted, but there was such hope in Jace’s voice that Magnus kept quiet. 

“I don’t believe it, but we have nothing else to go on,” Simon said tiredly. “There’s nowhere to go, nobody who can help us, and nothing to do except follow the instructions left to us by a missing woman. We marked the place on a map, and that’s where we’re headed.”

“I know where it is you need to go,” Magnus said, and both of them jerked a little. The car sputtered, and then kept on driving. 

“What?” Jace said sharply. “What are you talking about?”

“My grave,” Magnus said. “You need to go back to my grave.”

Simon hesitated. “That’s not the place we marked on the map.”

“The map is wrong,” Magnus said. “Trust me on this.”

There was silence, apart from the rumble of the car as it tore down a narrow lane. Jace was watching him uncertainly, and Simon was watching Jace uncertainly, and Magnus knew he had to get them to believe him, but he didn’t know how. 

“Please,” Magnus said. “Jace, trust me, like I’ve trusted you.”

This seemed to rouse something in Jace, who nodded stiffly. “If you’re sure this is going to help us find Alec, then fine. I trust you. Simon, do you remember how to get there?”

Simon gave a helpless little laugh. “That place is burned into my mind.”

“Join the club,” Magnus said drily, and Jace actually coughed out a laugh. A grin stretched across Simon’s face. Magnus felt a pang in his heart when he remembered that someone was missing from this, someone important. 

He settled back into his seat and kept his eyes on the road. They were going to get Alec back. 

They drove through the night in tense silence. 

It took long hours before they reached a familiar stretch of road, near the little hotel they had stayed in. Simon avoided it, driving further down a dirt lane and up onto a main road. Magnus couldn’t read the road signs in the dark, but he glimpsed a red telephone box through the fog, and he saw a gate that led to someone’s home. Simon parked the car in a siding and squinted out of the window, adjusting his glasses. 

“The moors are that way,” he said. “We need to stick together, so that we don’t get lost. We, uh – we found your grave somewhere up there, but we had to walk for quite a while. We didn’t want to be right by the main road.”

“Come on, then,” Jace muttered, and he climbed out of the car. 

Magnus had been buried on the moors, but he had never set foot on them whilst he was awake and willing. He found his feet stuck to the wet mulch as he stared and stared. He knew then that he could stand in any one spot, and every which way he turned, he would be greeted with beautiful views. It swept him in, it did, spread him out rather than sucking him in. It made him a part of it. He was included, involved. 

His voice was the whistle of the wind through the split-stone walls and his feet were roots planted deep in the earth. His eyes were the blue of the clouded sky and the mottled green of the ground and the brown of the solitary thickets. His arms, when he spread them, stretched the width of a birds’ wing and his hair became downy feathers, and his spine dipped and became the gentle curve of the valley. Standing there, in the middle of the moors, he was nothing more than a rock or a dip in the road, a lost, wandering sheep or the flurry of the trees. He was not important here, or relevant, or significant. He wasn’t Magnus, a lost, confused man with little to no past. He was simply one with this wonder. 

He shook off his awe and took a few steps forward. He heard Jace call out for him to wait, but there was no time. Magnus sprinted up the hill. The moors were huge and dark and haunting, and the sheer distance they had travelled was enough to make a man stop and stare in awe. There was an eerie stillness to the damp air, but Magnus ignored it. He didn’t care about the stretch of trees to his right, towering and menacing and whispering to each other. He took no notice of the lake that pooled on the other side of the hill, as smooth and silky as glass. The lights of little houses in the distance winked in and out of existence. Magnus didn’t care. 

He could feel the thrumming pulse of the earth beneath his feet and it mingled with his own, tugging at his heartstrings until he was being pulled in the right direction, rather than running of his own accord. His feet scarcely touched the ground. He flew up the hill with an inhuman grace, a phantom hand wrapped around his forearm, tugging him along, and then skidded to a stop at the top, breathless. 

There was a slightly raised patch of earth waiting for him. If he hadn’t been looking for it, he would never have spotted it. 

“This is where I was buried,” Magnus said. Jace came up behind him, gasping, Simon at his heels. Simon doubled over with a groan, bracing himself with his hands on his knees. 

“I don’t know,” Jace panted. “This isn’t exactly a small place, is it? We could have dug you up anywhere.”

“It was here,” Simon said, when he got his breath back. He pointed a shaking hand at something on the ground. “I remember the mushrooms.”

Mushrooms. Magnus tensed. He strode closer and then crouched down beside the raised earth, one hand hovering above the dewy grass. Sure enough, there were mushrooms. They were flat and thick, with splashes of red on the stalks, and they encased the patch of earth in a perfect circle. Magnus felt a wave of triumph as he touched one finger to the nearest mushroom and a static shock raced up his knuckles. 

“I thought they were weird,” Simon continued. “I haven’t seen mushrooms like that before, and they make a complete circle. And it’s odd that they just grew like that, around the grave.”

“Fairy rings,” Magnus said quietly. 

“Fairy what?”

“They have other names,” Magnus explained, although he didn’t know where the explanation come from. “An elf circle, or a pixie ring. They can appear overnight, or travel from place to place. Back when people were more superstitious, more prone to believing in magic, they considered fairy rings to be the work of dark forces.”

“Not all of them,” Simon said, and Magnus looked at him. “Some people thought they were a sign of good luck.”

“Some did,” Magnus admitted. “Most were wary.”

“Right, so, a bunch of moving magical mushrooms matters why?”

Magnus hesitated. “People thought that they were portals to another realm; the realm of the fae, in particular. And I know you don’t believe me, but I really did spend years in this grave. I’m trying to work out how I survived, and why, and the rings might be a clue.” 

Simon and Jace exchanged incredulous looks. 

“That’s the most I’ve heard you talk, Zombie, and it was all a bunch of crap,” Jace said. He laughed a little hysterically and dragged a hand through his hair. Magnus felt his heart clench as he and Simon shared another look. 

“Shard talked about rings,” Magnus pressed. “She said that I had to find the rings to bring Alec back. She said that he had left this world, and the rings are portals to another world. I started to wonder if that’s where I came from, another world. There’s a ring here, right around my grave. I’m not saying I understand it completely, but you found a ring of flowers in Agatha’s garden, right where Alec was standing when he disappeared. Why is this so hard for you to believe?”

“Because it’s ridiculous,” Jace said. “I’ll believe a lot of things, Magnus, but other worlds? Magical fairy rings? It’s stupid.”

“You would have believed Alec,” Magnus said sharply. Jace looked up immediately, his dark eyes fixed intensely on Magnus. 

“Don’t,” he said softly. “Don’t talk about him. I followed you halfway around the south-west because I thought you might be able to help him. I trusted you. But you’re just standing here, talking rubbish while he could be in serious danger, so don’t talk about him.”

Simon laid a hand roughly on Jace’s arm and jerked him around. They ducked their heads and Simon began to whisper to Jace, so quietly that Magnus couldn’t hear what was being said. He didn’t need to know, though. He could guess. 

_They don’t believe you_ , said a voice in the wind. Magnus froze, still crouched on the ground, and then shivered as a chill trickled down his spine. _And if they don’t believe you, then they will not help you, and if they will not help you, then your friend will die alone._

Magnus sucked in a breath. The space at his back was cold, and growing colder by the second. Magnus turned his head ever so slowly until he caught sight of one of the mushrooms and found that he could not look away. He could hear Simon and Jace arguing in whispers, but their voices were distant and faint. They hadn’t noticed his attention fraying. 

There were rules about the fairy rings. Warnings were whispered in the old days, when the circles appeared in the middle of the night with no rhyme or reason, when they could not be explained by scientific terms. Even now, they were considered a natural phenomenon by all those who acknowledged their presence. But one rule, above all others, rang clear and true: Never step foot in a fairy ring. 

Magnus stood up so abruptly that Jace and Simon fell silent. He turned his back on them, facing the fairy ring. He could feel it, the humming in the night, the charged tension in the air that seemed to crackle and hiss. It was too dark, but Magnus took a step forward regardless. He knew he was right. He just had to wait.

“What are you doing?” Jace said. “This is going to be hellishly embarrassing for you when nothing happens.” 

Magnus barely heard him; the clouds that cloaked the moon shifted with the cold breeze, and a brilliant white face appeared in the sky, hanging low over the muttering trees. Beams of light bathed the fairy ring in a champagne glow, and Magnus took a step forward, and then another, and then another, until he had stepped over the wall of mushrooms and into the circle. He shifted his weight. There was a familiar grave beneath his feet, and Magnus could feel it calling to him, but something else was speaking louder. 

For a moment, nothing happened. 

Jace snorted. Magnus heard him take a step, heard him take a breath, to laugh or to scoff, but then something gripped Magnus’s heart tightly, and he was being whisked away with a snap that broke through the night. His world went black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wooooo. The next one we get lots of Alec/Magnus interaction, which is a bit of a spoiler, but oh well. Hope you enjoyed that, thank you very much for reading! Please leave a comment/kudos and let me know what you thought, I'd love to hear from you. And come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr. Thanks!


	20. The Boy in the Ruins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “No,” Magnus said quietly. “I came to find you.”
> 
> Alec’s eyes snapped open.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New chapter! By far my favourite. Updates will be quite a bit slower from here on in, please be patient. Thank you so much for the lovely response to the last chapter, I promise to get around to answering comments soon. Thank you.
> 
> There is the death of a monster in this, but it isn't too graphic. Just a warning.

Alec’s blood-soaked face swam into view. His teeth were stained red and black and his lip was cut, but he grinned fiercely regardless. Magnus blinked up at him, barely able to think beyond the pounding of his heart and the rush of relief that swarmed him. He shot upright, arms outstretched, and Alec gripped his hands tightly. 

“You’re here,” Alec said. “We were looking for you, but we couldn’t find you. You’re here. You’re okay.”

“I’m here,” Magnus said, a little breathless in the face of Alec’s relief. “And so are you.”

“I thought you guys had forgotten me,” Alec teased, but Magnus could hear the real fear in his voice, which cracked on the next sentence. “The others? Jace and Simon?”

“They’re fine,” Magnus said hoarsely. “Worried, but fine.”

Alec helped him up and Magnus got a good look at him. He was a mess, dressed in ragged clothes and sporting more than enough cuts and bruises. One of his shoulders looked swollen, and he was hunched over slightly. The solid certainty that he wore as a cloak was gone, replaced with something unsure and hesitant. 

“Oh, Alexander,” Magnus said quietly, his voice hollow. He lifted a hand and placed it on Alec’s cheek, and Alec’s eyes widened, either at the name or at the touch. “What happened to you?”

“Things came out of the night,” Alec said darkly. He leaned into Magnus’ hand, his skin cold beneath his palm. “I fell through a ring of flowers, in the Professor’s garden, and landed in this place. I walked for a while, but I didn’t seem to go anywhere. And then the sun went down, and a red sun came up, and things came out of the night.”

Magnus shuddered. “What is this place?”

Alec laughed roughly. “Hell if I know. It might actually be hell, for how awful it is. I don’t know if we’re in a country or a town or a place like the moors. These are ruins, though. I think it used to be a castle, but whoever lived here is long since dead. I’ve done sweeps of the ruins and it’s pretty much deserted. The creatures in this place don’t seem to like it here, so it’s only the bravest monsters that try and fight me here.”

Magnus stared at him. He was talking like a boy from a fairy-tale and he looked like a solider, like something out of another land. His gaze was sharp and his teeth, when Magnus took a step forward, were a little pointier than usual. There was something about his eyes that made Magnus uneasy. Only one thing made sense. 

“How long has it been for you?” Magnus asked. 

“Days.” Alec licked his dry lips. “Weeks. It could have been months, for all I know. It’s different here. Everything moves so slowly, even time. Even the wind. What about you? How long have I been gone in your world?”

_Our world_ , Magnus wanted to say. “Thirteen hours.”

Alec licked his lips again and staggered back to lean against a broken wall. His eyes fluttered closed and his face lurched with grief. Magnus looked away. It felt too intrusive, to look upon that kind of misery. Instead, he looked at his surroundings. 

A sun hung in the sky, but it was crimson, the colour of spilled blood. There was something hungry about the black sky, as though it wanted to devour them, to wrap them in shadows and never let them leave. Magnus shrugged off the thought and stared at the stone walls towering around him, the crumbling remains of towers and turrets that just barely stood up. They appeared to be on an upper level of the ruins, but the air was thick with darkness and Magnus had no desire to move to the edge, to look over into the shadowed world he had stepped into. 

“How did you get here?” Alec asked. Magnus glanced over at him and saw that his eyes were still closed in pain. “Did you fall through?”

“No,” Magnus said quietly. “I came to find you.”

Alec’s eyes snapped open. 

“The flowers you fell through were part of a fairy ring, which mark the portals to a different realm,” Magnus explained. “The people that took me started talking about rings, and how someone had left this world. I needed to find a ring that was fully charged, so I could find you. I started to wonder if that might have been how I survived in my grave for all those years. If someone had put me in a pocket realm, for safekeeping, in a place where the rules of life and death were different, then that would explain how I could live even though I was dead.”

“So, you went back to the gravesite?” Alec frowned and came closer, pushing off from the wall. “Did you find anything?” 

“I made Jace drive me back to the moors, and I found my old grave. It was like something was pulling me towards it, like it knew why I had come back.” Magnus swallowed. He felt silly even saying the words, but there was no judgement on Alec’s face. “I found a fairy ring encircling the grave.”

He hesitated, and Alec narrowed his eyes. 

“Jace and Simon,” Alec said slowly. “Did you explain it to them?” 

Magnus nodded miserably, and then he tipped his chin up. “They didn’t believe me, so I came through on my own. I expected it from Simon, but Jace believed you, about your family and your power. I don’t understand why he thought I would lie about this.”

A hand found Magnus’s shoulder and gripped it firmly. When Magnus looked up, he saw the old Alec, the one with a warm, understanding smile and a calm certainty that everything would be alright. Magnus leaned into the smile gratefully. 

“Stress, I imagine,” Alec said. “Stress and worry and fear can make you behave differently. I’m sure he’s sorry now, and Simon won’t have a choice but to believe you now that he’s seen it with his own eyes. If you want, I can yell at them when we get back.”

Magnus chuckled a little. He looked at the ground at his feet, where he had been lying, and he saw a ring of strange flowers protruding from the piles of moss seeping up through the cracks in the bricks. Carefully, he stepped over them and out of the ring, and then he craned his head to look up at the sky. No moonlight. He kicked a flower gently, but nothing happened. 

“Have you tried stepping back through?” Magnus asked. 

“Hundreds of times,” Alec laughed. “No matter how long I wait, nothing changes. There are so many of these things littering the world, and I’ve stepped in all of them, but nothing changes. I still can’t get back.” 

He seized Magnus suddenly, as though he was afraid Magnus was just a figment of his imagination. 

“I’m glad you’re here,” Alec said fiercely. “Thank you for coming back for me.” 

As if there were anything else he would have done. Magnus laughed. 

Something in the darkness laughed back. 

Magnus’s world was a whirl of movement as Alec spun around, pushing Magnus behind him and crouching down low. Something sharp glinted in his hand. Magnus backed up into he was pressed against a wall. He could feel the crumbling stones shifting behind him loosely. 

A creature launched itself out of the shadows. It was small and ratty and Alec caught it by the neck, swinging it around and slamming it against the wall beside Magnus, who ducked out of the way with a cry. He stared at the creature; he had never seen anything like it before. Its eyes flitted about, big and bulging out of their sockets, and its hands were small with long, trailing nails. Jagged teeth snapped and hissed inches from Alec’s face. 

Magnus stepped closer. 

“Wait, don’t,” Alec started, but Magnus was entranced. A long, flimsy nail swiped out and sliced down Magnus’s chest, cutting through his thick jumper and catching on the threads. He yelped with pain and tried to push the creatures’ hand away, only to catch the serrated edge of its nail on his palm as well. 

“Step back,” Alec barked, flinging the creature at the ground. It landed with a hard smack against the overflowing vines and moss that coated the brickwork and yelped, falling silent. 

There was a brief struggle, and then Alec was kneeling on the ground, the creature pinned with a knife to its throat. Magnus swallowed back bile and clutched his chest, which was weeping blood. He glanced down; the cut wasn’t deep, but it was ragged from the serrated nail and stung. The one on his hand was deeper, bleeding badly. 

“Tell us how to get back,” Alec snarled. He was a different person, his face contorted with anger and disgust. The thing chuckled again, a rasping, grating sound, like metal and gravel grinding together. Deep blue blood welled up along the knife as Alec pressed it harder against mottled skin. 

“There is no moon, and there is no return,” the thing said. It seemed to be enjoying their misery. Magnus took in the words and cast his eyes to the left, sucking in a breath at the horror that awaited him there. Two suns, each as pale as pearls but burning bright, and a red horizon that seemed to unravel the longer he looked at it, until the soft threads of burgundy and blue became the blackest night. 

“What are you talking about?” Alec demanded, shaking the creature. “Answer me!” 

“If there’s no moon,” Magnus croaked, “then there’s no moonlight. And if there’s no moonlight, then there’s nothing to power the fairy rings. They won’t open.”

Alec swallowed thickly. “We can’t go home without the fairy rings. Even if we give them time to recharge, they won’t open without the moonlight. Magnus, I don’t know how long I’ve been here, but I’ve seen the days bleed into nights countless times, and I’ve never seen a sky with a moon in it. Just the two suns. How do we get home?” 

Magnus faced him and couldn’t help but think that he had doomed them both, simply by existing. If they had never stumbled across his sleeping form, then maybe all of this could have been avoided. Perhaps Magnus deserved it, whatever cause had put him in the ground while he was still alive, but Alec didn’t. Alec deserved kindness and a quiet life, and friends that didn’t bring trouble with them wherever he went. 

“Simon and Jace will work it out,” Magnus said quietly. He believed that. “They’ll come for us and they’ll get us out. We just have to stay alive until then.” 

“Good luck,” rasped the creature. “No moon, no moon, means no way out or back or forward. Your friends will fall into this place too, and they will perish just the same.” It licked its lips with a slimy tongue. “Fresh meat is hard to come by, ever since our world burned up.”

Alec dug the knife in a little harder. “If you want to live, I suggest you shut your mouth.” 

“More of us are coming,” the creature said gleefully. “More of us are coming. Only the Great Stone will–”

The creature cut itself off suddenly. Alec caught Magnus’s eye and then leaned in far enough, pressing down on his knife until the creature coughed and writhed in pain. 

“That sounded important,” Magnus said softly. “What’s this Great Stone?” 

“Nothing,” hissed the creature. It looked about shiftily, before lashing out with its nails again. The knife arced high and fell in a graceful swoop. The creature went still. Magnus sucked in a breath. 

Alec stood, wiping the knife on his jeans with a look of disgust. “That Great Stone must be important or he wouldn’t have gone quiet. It could be our ticket out of here, and luckily, I think I know what he was talking about.” 

Alec looked up and caught sight of Magnus. He must have seen something he didn’t like in Magnus’s eyes, because a multitude of expressions flickered across his face before he drew himself off, defensive. 

“I didn’t want to do it,” Alec said. “I don’t want to kill these things, but you’ve seen what they did to you and this isn’t even the worst thing I’ve encountered. There are more horrible creatures here, just waiting, and if I give even an inch, I’ll be dead in a heartbeat.”

“I’m not judging you,” Magnus promised him. “I’m just sad that you’ve had to do this all alone. If I could have come instead of you, I would have.”

It wasn’t a joke, but Alec laughed anyway before he beckoned Magnus over. He examined the wound on his chest, which was still bleeding sluggishly, and the cut on his hand. He ripped a strip of fabric off his ratty shirt and wrapped it around Magnus’s hand, tying a knot at the base of his thumb and giving his hand a gentle squeeze before nodding in satisfaction. His hand lingered, and Magnus wrapped their fingers together. 

“There,” Alec said, his voice a little hoarse. “It’s not clean and it’s definitely not a long-term solution, but it’ll do. I can’t do anything about your chest, but we can fix us both up when we get home.” 

“How are we going to get home?” Magnus asked. Alec let go, and he held his hand to his chest and stared up at the sun. He thought he could see mountains in the distance, tall and jagged, like teeth piercing the veil of the sky. 

Alec frowned. “There’s only one stone that I’ve seen around here, as tall as anything. That might be what that creature was talking about. I didn’t go near it because it didn’t look defensible, but it’s impossible to miss, and it’s not too far from here.” 

“The thing said that more were coming,” Magnus said. “What does that mean?” 

Alec knelt down for a moment to pick up his knife and stowed it away. “It means that we have to run.” 

They climbed down the crumbling staircase that snaked through the ruins. Magnus thought it might have been a castle, once, or a great palace. He pictured towers and turrets and fluttering white flags and his heart swelled. And then he thought of black smoke and ash and wet, grey stone, and his stomach sank and rolled. 

Stepping out of the ruins was like stepping onto the moors. There was so much to look at that his eyes couldn’t take it in. Gorse and strange flowers and buzzing creatures that seemed to glow. Mud and black vines and trees that hunkered over as if their old bones were weighed down with many sorrows. Fields that had lost their green. Magnus saw it all as he followed Alec, sprinting as though the hounds of hell were snapping at their heels. From the darkness all around came howls and screeches of unholy things, and Alec reached behind him and grabbed Magnus, shoving him in front and urging him on with hissed words of encouragement. 

“Stop,” said a voice. Magnus crashed to a halt in the thick undergrowth, brambles tangled around his knees and scoring lines into his jeans. Alec stumbled into him and gripped his waist to keep them both from falling, bracing a hand against a large granite structure that stood nearby, towering over them. It was a tall grey stone with a rough hole hewn into the top of it, far too high for them to reach, and it seemed to have sprung up out of nowhere.

Magnus looked around for the voice, which had a quality to it that demanded obedience, but found nothing. 

“Down here,” came the voice again, laced with amusement. Both Magnus and Alec glanced down. 

“Oh,” Alec said. “I was not expecting that.”

It was a man, but a man so small that he almost wasn’t a man at all. He perched on a small rock, directly beneath the larger stone, his tiny hands and feet splayed against the warm surface beneath him. Magnus could see webbed fingers the size of snapped matchsticks. His hands were as small as thimbles and his face was pointy, the colour of tarnished silver. He had a placid smile, but his teeth looked sharp enough to break steel.

“Hands off the Great Stone,” the little man said to Alec. “You can’t just go around touching things that don’t belong to you. Especially not with hands as bloody as those. Do you never bathe?” 

Alec blinked at his own hand as though he’d never seen it before, removing it slowly from the Great Stone. The blood had dried, but still caked his skin in flaky layers. Magnus was more fascinated by the creature, who spoke with a thin accent that did not disguise his scathing tone. 

“We were told that a Great Stone could offer us a way out,” Alec said slowly. “We need to get out of this place. Is this the way out? Is this the Great Stone?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” the creature said, rolling its beady little eyes. “And what you need is a way forward, not a way out.”

“A way forward?”

“Yes, a way forward,” the little man said, clearly exasperated. “Are you deaf or something? Got blood in your ears too?” 

Alec flinched at the mocking tone, and Magnus felt anger billow through him.

“Is it your stone?” Magnus asked.

“Nah,” the little man said. “I’m just the Pay-Taker. Or the Toll-man, as the Big Folk call me. The Great Stone belongs to the land, not the creatures that walk it. And you can only go through if your heart is true.” 

The Toll-man flushed a little, his cheeks turning from silver to black, as if the triteness of his own comment embarrassed him. Magnus offered him a quirk of a smile. 

“I thought Toll-men worked bridges,” Alec said. 

“You’re not a sharp one, are you?” said the Toll-man. “Take a knock to the head?” 

“Several.” Alec’s voice was dry and unimpressed. 

The Toll-man eyed him for a moment before shrugging. “Bridges stretch from here to there, a link between two places. This one just happens to look a bit different, that’s all. You’re here, and you need to get there, and the Great Stone can do that, so that makes it a bridge, see?”

Magnus did see. He also saw a slight hitch in their plans. “Toll-men take payment from those that want to cross their bridges, don’t they?” 

“Aye,” said the Toll-man. “What have you got that’s worth anything?” 

Magnus stood up a little straighter. Alec’s hand darted to his pocket and clenched down on something inside of it; paper crumpled beneath his harsh grip. Magnus’s hands were on a hopeless journey to his empty pockets when he caught the Toll-man’s laughter, which was so small that it was almost inaudible. 

“I’m having you on,” the Toll-man said, grinning. He stood to his full height, which was no bigger than a kitten, and put his webbed hands on his hips as he stared them up and down. 

“Ain’t many people that pass through the Great Stone these days, from either end,” the Toll-man said. “It used to be a way of trapping the stupid folk. They’d climb through the hole in a drunken game and fall out here, and then I’d rob them blind and send them on their way out, and they’d end up miles from where they were, stumbling about and getting shooed away by farmers’ wives. Ah, those were the days.”

The Toll-man had a wistful look on his face, which faded into something serious. “But you, you two are different, and you’re looking for a way forward, not a way out. I’m going to do this the Old Way.” 

“I thought you said that all you needed to pass through was a good heart,” Alec snapped. “What’s all this about ways and old days and bridges? 

The Toll-man rolled his eyes. “Ways make up all of the world. You were all born down here. You lived a life among these greens and greys, and when you died down here, you were born up there. The wheel keeps on turning.”

Alec snorted incredulously. “Are you trying to sell Reincarnation to us?” 

“I’m not selling you anything,” the Toll-man snapped. “It just is what it is, whether you want to believe it or not. Do you think we ever really die? Do you think we stop living just because our bodies are broken husks and our mind sleeps? No. No, we carry on. Whether in soul or spirit, no matter what you believe, there is always a new life waiting for us. There is always something at the edge of everything.”

A sceptical silence radiated from Alec, but Magnus could feel his pulse begin to pick up speed. His tongue burned with questions that he couldn’t ask, but he could sense that the answers were down here, in this strange, familiar land. The Toll-man glanced at him and narrowed his eyes. 

“You know a little of what I speak,” the Toll-man muttered. He stared at Magnus for a few long seconds, and then his eyes widened and his face flared an even brighter silver, like the first wisp of starlight in a black sky. He had seen something in Magnus. “Improbable, but not impossible. Come here, boy.” 

Hesitant, and conscious of Alec’s horrified stare, Magnus crept closer and knelt on the ground in front of the creature. The Great Stone was even larger from down here and it seemed to look at him, the way the glass buildings in the rest-stop had looked at him, the way the hills on the moors had looked at him. 

The Toll-man scanned him gravely, his keen little eyes taking in every freckle, every wrinkled line around his eyes, and then he sat back and said, “I know you. I know your face. Yes, yes we will have to do this the Old Way, for sure.” 

“Can’t we just go through the damn stone?” Alec said. 

“You can if you have a death wish,” the Toll-man said blithely. He flicked a hand at the Great Stone. “Go ahead, make my day.”

Alec ground his teeth together and raked a hand roughly through his hair. Whatever patience he had seemed to have expired, so Magnus turned to the Toll-man and said, “What do you need?” 

“I need courage and wisdom and truth,” said the Toll-man. “That’s the price that you pay, for a way forward. I’m a toll man by nature, after all, and nothing in this world or the next is free.”

Courage and wisdom and truth. What could that possibly mean?

“Those are concepts,” Alec growled. “How are we supposed to give those to you?” 

The Toll-man didn’t reply. He simply waited, blinking up at them slowly. Magnus didn’t know how they could possibly give a creature their courage, or their wisdom, or even their honesty, but as his hands flitted to his pockets again, he knew that this was all they had. It was the only way back to Jace and Simon. Magnus lowered his voice until it was nothing but a sigh on the fragrant wind. 

“I can’t be sure that my heart is a good one,” Magnus said quietly. “I don’t know it well enough. And I don’t know enough to be considered wise, and I’m scared all the time.”

He hesitated, tasting expectation in the air. Alec had gone oddly still behind him, but the Toll-man was waiting patiently, still with that same placid expression. 

“It is not a good heart, this one,” Magnus said, tapping his own chest. “It’s heavy and dark and full of sadness that I don’t understand. But if courage is what you need, then there’s nobody braver than Alexander.” He gestured to Alec, who drew himself up in surprise. There was still blood on his skin and his teeth and his hands, and his eyes were still dark and desperate, but there was something else on the fringes of the desperation, clinging to it. Warmth and remembrance, and with it came sorrow and a pounding grief, and the old Alec melted into the new one. 

The Toll-man dipped his head. 

“And we have another friend waiting for us in the other world,” Magnus added. “He’s the smartest person I know. And another friend, too, who’s always honest.”

“Sometimes too honest,” Alec muttered. 

“I don’t know if that’s enough,” Magnus said. “But it’s all we have.”

The Toll-man laid a cold hand on Magnus’s cheek and smiled thinly. “You’ve given me all three things, lad, and I’ll take them gladly.” 

The hole at the top of the Great Stone seemed to expand, growing until the Great Stone was little more than a frame of thin rock around a beckoning doorway. Alec cried out with relief and ushered Magnus towards it, but Magnus’s feet refused to move. For one terrible moment, he didn’t think he could bare to leave this place. An old fear crept back into him, flowing through his blood and freezing it like ice. He felt cold and small and afraid, and the Toll-man smiled. 

“You’ve had your time here, lad, short though it was. Just because you don’t remember it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Now it’s time to go back.” The Toll-man bared his teeth just as Alec grasped Magnus’s hand and dragged him towards the Great Stone. “Or forward, as it were.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There! I really hope you liked it, thank you so much. Please leave a comment or a kudos if you did, and come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks so much!

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it, I have more chapters ready to post, so it shouldn't be too long til the next one. Please leave a comment or a kudos on your way out and come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr, I'd love to hear from you! Thank you!


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